Artificial Intelligence: Natural Language Processing(NLP)

Artificial Intelligence: Natural Language Processing(NLP)

Do you know NLP(Natural Language Processing)? Do you hear AI(Artificial Intelligence)? Today, AI is a really hot topic on scientific and technical stage. NLP is one of the classical AI problems.

Let us look at the picture below: the toaster is telling Srini that Srini's toasts are ready. One people is asking his computer to send new year postcards to all his friends in the address and translate to German for his German friends. Yes, human is communicating with machine and the machine can understand human's language. The contents of the picture is the result of NLP(Natural Language Processing).

      Don't you mind I tell you some of my dreams? They are following:

·       I dream I can talk to my TV set: show me The Lion King?

·       I dream I can communicate with my Ipad.  When I tell it that I am sad, it can analyze the questions and enlighten me like my soul friends.  When I am happy, it can enjoy the feeling with me.

·       I dream my computer can read the newspaper and tell me the important news only.

·       Ahhh, I hope my PC can do English homework for me, isn't it your dream?

......

Don't you have the same dreams as me? These dreams are so amazing. These smart computers can change people's life. They can lead human to a new technical world.

All them need NLP.

What is NLP?  we firstly need  to know what Natural Language is. Natural Language refers to the language spoken by people such as English, Chinese, Japanese, as opposed to artificial languages, like C++, Java, etc. NLP(Natural Language Processing) is the subject that processes information contained in natural text. It is also known as Computational Linguistics(CL), Human Language Technology(HLT),  or Natural Language Engineering(NLE).

How do we measure intelligence of a machine? The most famous way is Turing test-Alan Turling(1950) which says that a machine can be accepted to be intelligent if it can fool a  judge that its human over a tele-typing exercise.

Two well-known intelligent systems are ELIZA and SHRDLU.   ELIZA (1966 by Weizenbaum)  pretends to be a psychiatrist and converses with a patient on his problem. It uses keyword pattern matching technology to "understand" and "solve" the patient's problem. Many patients though the system really understood their problems. The image below is showing the chatting process。

SHRDLU(1968-70 by Terry Winograd MIT AI Lab) works on a "Blocks World" as a simulated environment in which blocks like colored cubes, cylinders, pyramids can be moved around, placed over each other. It can understand a bit of  anaphora.  These intelligent system like ELIZA and SHRDLU need strong and excellent databases.

NLP is a popular technology. More and more universities are working on it. But,  it is still like a baby who just begins his life.  With the development of kinds of technology, I believe NLP will grow up quickly.

In sum, NLP is one technology which makes machine understand people's language and communicate with people like a human. In other words, NLP will help a machine be a "human". 

The road is far. The hope is there. Let us work hard!

Reference: Wiki