Natural Language Research

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When investigating Natural language Processing, we must first outline the various difficulties attributed to writing programs that 'understand' natural language. We note the ambiguity, imprecision and inherent informality of natural language and the gap between that ambiguity and the precision and formality of languages used in to software development for analysis, design and programming. Bridging the gap between informal natural language and formal conceptual models is key with applications designed to 'understand' natural language. Secondly, we will outline some of the applications developed to ‘understand’ natural language through the decades. We will look at the ground breaking work in the 1960s with ELIZA , which used a rudimentary parser to mimic a therapist down through the eighties and the great leaps IBM had in language translating interfaces all the way to the birth of WATSON, the super-human interfacing program which beat two seasoned human players due to its massive bank of knowledge and SIRI with its voice recognition capabilities. Finally, we will investigate the various techniques and theories used in natural language processing to create applications that ‘understand’ human language. Namely, theories of parsing, semantics, Word sense disambiguation , corpus linguistics and the lexicon.
Barriers to Natural Language Understanding in Applications
In any interaction with a computer, we use natural language to describe our needs and problems. The natural language we use to describe our problems and demands are often complex, vague and ambiguous. Human sentences are complicated and complex. This is especially true when they contain clauses and phrases that describe and relate several objects, conditions and actions. Sen...

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... its structure from its constituent parts. We outlined ambiguity in text is a major issue encountered with NLP ambiguity in natural language and that Word sense disambiguation is the theory developed and implemented to counter that major barrier. Finally we investigated Semantics or the study of meaning behind words. We noted that as important as syntax is in understanding natural languages. We noted that any application needs a semantic theory to guide the comprehension and create an efficient human interface. In investigating various barriers associated with natural language understanding as well as applications in the discipline over the decades and finally some of the techniques or methodologies implemented by these applications to successfully understand natural language we were able to thoroughly and comprehensively investigate Natural Language Understanding.

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