Definition and scope of NLP

Summary

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the processing of natural language information by a computer. It is a subfield of computer science closely associated with artificial intelligence, and it also draws on related areas such as information retrieval, knowledge representation, computational linguistics, and linguistics more broadly. In practice, NLP systems aim to convert human language (text and/or speech) into forms that computers can analyze, understand, and generate. The scope of NLP includes major processing tasks such as speech recognition, text classification, natural language understanding, and natural language generation. NLP also covers a wide range of intermediate linguistic analyses that support these goals, including text segmentation/tokenization, morphological analysis (e.g., lemmatization and stemming), and syntactic analysis (e.g., sentence boundary detection and grammar-related tasks). More advanced work extends beyond individual sentences to discourse-level meaning and higher-level applications that use these analyses to solve real-world problems.

Key Points

• 1

  NLP focuses on enabling computers to process natural language information, linking computer science, AI, and linguistics-related disciplines.

• 2

  Core NLP tasks include speech recognition, text classification, natural language understanding, and natural language generation.