Natural Language Processing

Abstract

Natural language processing is the set of methods for making human language accessible to computers. In the past decade, natural language processing has become embedded in our daily lives: automatic machine translation is ubiquitous on the web and in social media, text classification keeps emails from collapsing under a deluge of spam, search engines have moved beyond string matching and network analysis to a high degree of linguistic sophistication, dialog systems provide an increasingly common and effective way to get and share information. These diverse applications are based on a common set of ideas, drawing on algo rithms, linguistics, logic, statistics, and more. The goal of this text is to provide a survey of these foundations. The technical fun starts in the next chapter, the rest of this current chapter situates natural language processing with respect to other intellectual disciplines, identifies some high-level themes in contemporary natural language processing, and ad vises the reader on how best to approach the subject.