17 Some aspects of natural language processing

Abstract

This chapter describes a few aspects of natural language processing (NLP) that gives some idea of the role of grammars and parsing and the use of some statistical techniques (albeit rather simple ones at present) in the formulation of the theories in NLP and in the implementation of NLP systems. Language (spoken and written) is central to all aspects of communication. So natural language processing systems (NLP), both current and future, are bound to play a crucial role in humans' communication with machines and even among themselves. NLP systems include systems for speech recognition, language understanding, and language generation. Multilingual NLP has applications to a variety of multilingual interfaces, ranging from providing aids for translating foreign language correspondence, translating equipment manuals, and speech-to-speech translation in limited domains. NLP is concerned with (i) the study of mathematical and computational models of the structure and function of language, its use, and its acquisition and (ii) the design, development, and implementation of a wide range of systems. The chapter discusses a few issues in NLP such as grammars and parsing, statistical approaches to NLP, and multilingual natural language processing, which includes machine translation using parallel texts and statistical techniques.