Natural Language Processing.

 Processing written text, using lexical, syntactic and semantic knowledge of the language as well as the required real world information.

Processing spoken language using all the information needed above plus additional knowledge about phonology as well as enough added information to handle the further ambiguities that arise in speech.

1) Source Language.

2) Target Representation.

Steps in Natural Language Processing:

1) Morphological Analysis: Individual worlds are analyzed into their components and non word tokens, such as punctuation are separated from the words.

2) Syntactic Analysis: Linear sequences of words are transformed into structures that show how the words relate each other. Some word sequences may be rejected if they violate the languages rules for how words may be combined.

3) Semantic Analysis: The structures created by the syntactic analyzer are assigned meanings.

4) Discourse Integration: The meaning of an individual sentences may depend on the sentences that precede it and may influence the meanings of the sentence( may depend on the sentences that precede it) that follow it.

5) Pragmatic Analysis: The structure representing what was said is reinterpreted to determine that what was actually meant. For example, the sentence “Do you know what time it is?” should be interpreted as a request to be told the time.

To make the overall language understanding problem tractable, it will help if we distinguish between the following two ways of decomposing a program.

The processes and the knowledge required to perform the task.

The global control structure that is imposed on those process.