Lecture 1 Introduction

Introduction to Natural
Language Processing
This lecture
• Introduction to Language
• What is NLP? Why it is important?
• NLP Applications
• Linguistic Knowledge
• Challenges
• NLP course- What will you learn from this course?
• Natural language vs. Artificial Language
• A vocabulary consists of a set of words
• A text is composed of a sequence of words from a vocabulary
• A language is constructed of a set of all possible texts
• What is NLP
• Wiki: Natural language processing(NLP) is a field of computer science,
artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics concerned with the
interactions between computers and human (natural) languages.
• Identify the structureand meaningof words, sentences, textsand
conversations
• Deep understanding of broad language
NLP
• Identify the structure and meaning of words, sentences, texts and

conversations
• Deep understanding of broad language
• NLP is all around us
This lecture
• Challenges
NLP Applications
• Spell and Grammar Checking
• Checking spelling and grammar
• Suggesting alternatives for the errors
Optical Character Recognition
• Optical character recognition or optical character reader is the
electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten
or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned
document, a photo of a document, a scene-photo or from subtitle
text superimposed on an image
Word Prediction
• Predicting the next word that is highly probable to be typed by the user
Information Retrieval
Finding relevant information to the user’s query

Text Categorization
• Assigning one (or more) pre-defined category to a text

Summarization
• Automatic summarization is the process of shortening a set of data
computationally, to create a subset that represents the most
important or relevant information within the original content
Machine translation
• The task of automatically converting source text in one language to
text in another language.
• In a machine translation task, the input already consists of a
sequence of symbols in some language, and the computer program
must convert this into a sequence of symbols in another language.
Dialogue systems
• A dialogue system, or conversational agent, is a computer system
intended to converse with a human. Dialogue systems employed one
or more of text, speech, graphics, haptics, gestures, and other modes
for communication on both the input and output channel.
Sentiment/ opinion analysis
• the process of computationally identifying and categorizing opinions
expressed in a piece of text, especially in order to determine whether
the writer's attitude towards a particular topic, product, etc. is
positive, negative, or neutral.
Speech recognition
• Recognizing a spoken language and transforming it into a text
Speech synthesis
• Producing a spoken language from a text
Question answering
• Question answering is a computer science discipline within the fields
of information retrieval and natural language processing, which is
concerned with building systems that automatically answer questions
posed by humans in a natural language
• IBM Watson is an automated question answering system and won the
Jeopardy contest.
Digital personal assistant
• An intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) or intelligent personal assistant
(IPA) is a software agent that can perform tasks or services for an
individual based on commands or questions (Natural Language
Instructions). Sometimes the term "chatbot" is used to refer to virtual
assistants generally or specifically accessed by online chat.
Information extraction
• Unstructured text to database entries
• Information extraction is the process of extracting specific (pre-
specified) information from textual sources.
• One of the most trivial examples is when your email extracts only the
data from the message for you to add in your Calendar.
Language Comprehension
• Machine Comprehension (MC), or the ability to read and understand
unstructured text and then answer questions about it remains a
challenging task for computers.
Level of difficulties
• Easy (mostly solved)

• Spell and grammar checking
• Some text categorization tasks
• Some named-entity recognition tasks
• Intermediate (good progress)
• Information retrieval
• Sentiment analysis
• Machine translation
• Information extraction
Levels of difficulty
• Difficult (still hard)
• Question answering
• Summarization
• Dialog systems
This lecture
• Challenges
Linguistic knowledge
NLP and linguistics :
• Letters – a,b,c … z
• Words – combining letters to form words
• Phonetics and phonology - The study of linguistic sounds and their
relations to words
• Morphology - The study of internal structures of words and how they can
be modified, parsing complex words into their components e.g.
(ni)(na)(kula).
• Syntax - The study of the structural relationships between words in a
sentence
• Semantics - The study of the meaning of words, and how these combine to
form the meanings of sentences
Discourse
• The study of linguistic units larger than a single statement
John reads a book. He borrowed it from his friend.
Pragmatics
• Social use of language

• The study of how language is used to accomplish goals, and the
influence of context on meaning
• Understanding the aspects of a language which depends on situation
and world knowledge
Give me the salt!
Could you please give me the salt?
This lecture
• NLP Techniques
• Challenges
Challenges
• Word sense ambiguity Word sense / meaning ambiguity
Ambiguity
• Ambiguous headlines:
• Include your children when baking cookies – as an ingredient??
• Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors – Doctors with 7 feet??
• Iraqi Head Seeks Arms – Head seeking arms??
• Discourse ambiguity- Pronoun reference ambiguity

• Madam Lilian normally brings her cat , Cindy, to class. She just loves to give
big kisses.
• Does she refer to Madam Lilian or her cat?
• Alice understands that you like your mother, but she …
• Does she refer to Alice or your mother?
Ambiguity
• Semantic ambiguity
• Words with multiple meanings
• Fall
• The third season of the year
• Moving down towards the ground or towards a lower position
• Sentences expressing more than one meaning
• The door is open.
• Expressing a fact
• A request to close the door
• Syntax and ambiguity

• John killed a man with a knife
Phonetics and phonology
• Words which sound the same but have different meanings
• Plain –plane
• Sea – see
• But – butt
• Two –too
• Ice cream – I scream
• Your students – you’re students
Paraphrasing
• Different words/sentences express the same meaning
• Season of the year
• Fall
• Autumn
• Book delivery time
• When will my book arrive?
• When will I receive my book?
Language is not static
• Language grows and changes

• E.g. cyber lingo - lol, lmao, bff, luwanh
scale
• What is the size of a language? How many words?

• Examples:
• Bible (King James version): ~700K words
• Penn Tree bank ~1M from Wall street journal
• Newswire collection:500M+
• Wikipedia: 2.9 billion words (English)
• Web: several billions of words
This lecture
• Challenges
What you will learn in this course
• The NLP pipeline - key components of text understanding and
• Core NLP techniques: tokenization, lemmatization, stemming, chunking,
Sentence splitting, part of speech tagging, syntactic parsing
• Core NLP technologies : named entity recognition, co-reference resolution,
event extraction, language modelling
• Text analytics using Python, NLTK, Spacy
• Text classification and sentiment analysis
• Sentence representation – bag of words, tf-idf
• Building a simple text classifier
• Recent trends in NLP – words embeddings and Neural Networks

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Introduction to Natural

• Identify the structure and meaning of words, sentences, texts and

Finding relevant information to the user’s query

• Assigning one (or more) pre-defined category to a text

• Easy (mostly solved)

• Social use of language

• Discourse ambiguity- Pronoun reference ambiguity

• Syntax and ambiguity

• Language grows and changes

• What is the size of a language? How many words?

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