Understanding the basics of natural language

We don’t yet have any technologies that can extract the rich meaning that humans experience when they understand natural language; however, given specific goals and applications, we will find that the current state of the art can help us achieve many practical, useful, and socially beneficial results through NLP.

Both spoken and written languages are ubiquitous and abundant. Spoken language is found in ordinary conversations between people and intelligent systems, as well as in media such as broadcasts, films, and podcasts. Written language is found on the web, in books, and in communications between people such as emails. Written language is also found in the free text fields of forms and databases that may be available online but are not indexed by search engines (the invisible web).

All of these forms of language, when analyzed, can form the basis of countless types of applications. This book will lay the basis for the fundamental analysis techniques that will enable you to make use of natural language in many different applications.