Selecting NLP approaches

NLP can be done with a wide variety of possible techniques. When you get started on an NLP application, you have many choices to make, which are affected by a large number of factors. One of the most important factors is the type of application itself and the information that the system needs to extract from the data to perform the intended task. The next section addresses how the application affects the choice of techniques.

Fitting the approach to the task

Recall from Chapter 1, that there are many different types of NLP applications divided into interactive and non-interactive applications. The type of application you choose will play an important role in choosing the technologies that will be applied to the task. Another way of categorizing applications is in terms of the level of detail required to extract the needed information from the document. At the coarsest level of analysis (for example, classifying documents into two different categories...