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04-Formal_definitions.md

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Formal definitions

NLP:

  • Deals text and speech

Related disciplines:

  • Linguistics. What makes an utterance correct or not.
  • Psycholinguistics: experiments area. E.g. word introduced twice in a sentence, audio and how it is procesed.
  • Philosophy: what does words mean.
  • Comptational linguistics: takes the aforementioned and process them.

Motivations:

  • Understand how humans communicate using language.
  • Language is a distinguishing feature of humans (very social).
  • Gossip replaces grooming (lol).
  • Collective memory: with language.
  • Some diferences are grounded in linguistics: there are two words for blue in Russian.
  • Technological.

Difficult:

  • New words ("ecotourist"), word senses ("literally", "gay").
  • Highly ambiguous: crane (grúa, grulla in Spanish), bank.
  • Multiple possible syntactics structures for word sequences.
  • Complex: many grammar rules, and some not even exist.
  • Partial knowledge: He put the computer on the chair. It was (wobbly | still hot).

History:

  • 1940's: Turing decyphering the Germans.
  • 1950's: semiconductors, Lisp is invented, Turing Test, Chomsky.
  • 1960's: minicomputers, Eliza.
  • 1970's: prolog, speech recognition.
  • 1980's: Internet, declarative representations.
  • 1990's: explosion of internet, formal/statistical approaches in NLP.
  • 2000's: mass storage.

Other stuff:

  • Question answering
  • Natural Language Generation
  • Spoken Dialogue Systems: people does not like talking with computers.