Natural Language Processing: by Dr. Parminder Kaur
Natural Language Processing: by Dr. Parminder Kaur
By
Dr. Parminder Kaur
What is NLP?
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
– Computers use (analyze, understand,
generate) natural language
– A somewhat applied field
• Computational Linguistics (CL)
– Computational aspects of the human
language faculty
– More theoretical
Goals of NLP
• Scientific Goal
– Identify the computational machinery
needed for an agent to exhibit various
forms of linguistic behavior
• Engineering Goal
– Design, implement, and test systems
that process natural languages for
practical applications
Applications
• speech processing: get flight information or book
a hotel over the phone
• information extraction: discover names of people
and events they participate in, from a document
• machine translation: translate a document from
one human language into another
• question answering: find answers to natural
language questions in a text collection or
database
• summarization: generate a short biography of
Noam Chomsky from one or more news articles
General Themes
• Ambiguity of Language
• Language as a formal system
• Computation with human language
• Rule-based vs. Statistical Methods
• The need for efficiency
Topic Ideas
1.Text to Speech – artificial voices
2.Speech Recognition - understanding
3.Textual Analysis – readability
4.Plagiarism Detection – candidate selection
5.Intelligent Agents – machine interaction
Text to Speech – artificial voice
• Text Input
• Break text into phonemes
– Match phonemes to voice elements
– Concatenate voice elements
– Manipulate pitch and spacing
• Output results
• Research question: How can a human voice be
used to produce an artificial voice?
• Model Talker - opportunities for active, hands-on
research
Speech Recognition
• Spoken Input
• Identify words and phonemes in speech
– Generate text for recognized word parts
– Concatenate text elements
– Perform spelling, grammar and context checking
• Output results
• Research question: How can speech recognition
assist a deaf student taking notes in class?
• VUST – Villanova University Speech Transcriber
Textual Analysis - Readability
• Text Input
• Analyze text & estimate “readability”
– Grade level of writing
– Consistency of writing
– Appropriateness for certain educ. level
• Output results
• Research question: How can computer
analyze text and measure readability?
• Opportunities for hands-on research
Plagiarism Detection
• Text Input
• Analyze text & locate “candidates”
– Find one or more passages that might be plagiarized
– Algorithm tries to do what a teacher does
– Search on Internet for candidate matches
• Output results
• Research question: What algorithms work like
humans when finding plagiarism?
• Experimental CS research
Intelligent Agents
• Example: ELIZA
• AIML: Artificial Intelligence Modeling Lang.
• Human types something
• Computer parses, “understands”, and generates
response
• Response is viewed by human
• Research question: How can computers
“understand” and “generate” human writing?
• Also good area for experimentation
Digital Image Processing
• The images in previous slides are digital
(now), but they are NOT the result of DIP
• Digital Image Processing is
– Processing digital images by a digital
computer
• DIP requires a digital computer and other
supporting technologies (e.g., data
storage, display and transmission)
Photography
Motion Pictures
Law Enhancement and Biometrics
Remote Sensing
chest head
PET and Astronomy
Operate in gamma-ray frequency