Brief History of NLP
o 1950s: Alan Turing proposed the Turing Test to evaluate a
machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to,
or indistinguishable from, that of a human.
o 1960s: Development of early NLP systems such as ELIZA, a
computer program by Joseph Weizenbaum that simulated
conversation.
o 1970s-1980s: Introduction of rule-based systems like
SHRDLU and the development of the Chomsky hierarchy in
linguistics.
o 1990s: Statistical approaches began to dominate NLP,
utilizing probabilistic models to handle large corpora of text
data.
o 2000s: The rise of machine learning and deep learning
techniques led to significant advancements in NLP, such as
Google's PageRank algorithm for search engines.
o 2010s-Present: Development of powerful deep learning
models like Word2Vec, GloVe, BERT, and GPT, which
have revolutionized NLP tasks such as language translation,
sentiment analysis, and text generation.
Language Challenges in NLP
o Ambiguity: Words and sentences can have multiple
meanings.
o Example: "The farmer went to the bank." (Is "bank"
referring to the side of a river or a financial institution?)
o Context: Understanding the context is crucial for accurate
interpretation.
Example: "He banked the plane" vs. "He went to the
bank."
o Sarcasm and Irony: Detecting sarcasm and irony can be
challenging.
Example: "Oh, great! Another homework
assignment."
o Diverse Syntax and Grammar: Different languages have
different syntax and grammar rules.
Example: Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) , She eats an
apple in English vs. Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) in
Japanese. Kanojo wa ringo o taberu
o Idioms and Phrases: Recognizing and interpreting
idiomatic expressions.
Example: "Kick the bucket" meaning "to die."
Applications of NLP
o Machine Translation: Translating text from one language
to another.
Example: Google Translate translating "Hello, world!"
into Spanish as "¡Hola, mundo!"
o Sentiment Analysis: Determining the sentiment (positive,
negative, neutral) of a text.
Example: Analyzing product reviews to determine
customer satisfaction.
o Chatbots: Automated systems that interact with users via
text or speech.
Example: Customer support chatbots like those used
by banks or online retailers.
o Information Retrieval: Extracting relevant information
from large datasets.
Example: Search engines like Google retrieving
relevant web pages based on user queries.
o Speech Recognition: Converting spoken language into text.
Example: Voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and
Google Assistant.
Classical vs. Statistical vs. Deep Learning-based NLP
Classical NLP:
o Rule-based Approaches: Utilize hand-crafted rules to
process language.
Example: Parsing sentences using grammar rules.
o Manual Feature Engineering: Involves defining specific
linguistic features for analysis.
Example: Identifying parts of speech (POS) using
predefined rules.
Statistical NLP:
o Probabilistic Models: Use statistical methods to model and
predict language patterns.
Example: Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) for POS
tagging.
o Large Amounts of Data: Relies on extensive corpora to
learn patterns.
Example: Using n-grams to predict the next word in a
sentence.
Deep Learning-based NLP:
o Neural Networks: Employ deep neural networks to learn
from raw text data.
Example: Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) for
sequence prediction.
o End-to-End Learning: Models can learn to perform tasks
directly from data without explicit feature engineering.
Example: Transformers like BERT and GPT for
various NLP tasks.
Basic Concepts in Linguistic Data Structure
Morphology:
o Study of word structure and formation.
o Example: Analyzing the root, prefix, and suffix of words
like "unhappiness" (un- + happy + -ness).
Syntax:
o Rules that govern sentence structure.
o Example: English follows Subject-Verb-Object (SVO)
order: "She (S) loves (V) music (O)."
Semantics:
o Meaning of words and sentences.
o Example: Understanding that "bark" can refer to the sound a
dog makes or the outer covering of a tree.
Pragmatics:
o Contextual use of language.
o Example: Interpreting "Can you pass the salt?" as a request
rather than a question about ability.
Tokenized Text and Pattern Matching
o Tokenization: Splitting text into individual tokens (words or
sentences).
o Example:
Input Text: "Natural Language Processing is
fascinating."
Tokenized Text: ['Natural', 'Language', 'Processing',
'is', 'fascinating', '.']
Explanation: The sentence is divided into individual
words and punctuation marks.
o Pattern Matching: Identifying patterns within tokenized
text using regular expressions.
o Example:
Input Text: "The quick brown fox jumps over the
lazy dog."
Pattern: Words with exactly 4 letters.
Matched Words: ['quick', 'over', 'lazy']
Explanation: The pattern identifies words that are
exactly four letters long within the sentence.
Recognizing Names
o Named Entity Recognition (NER): Identifies proper nouns
and classifies them as people, organizations, etc.
o Example:
Input Text: "Barack Obama was the 44th President of
the United States."
Recognized Entities:
'Barack Obama' as PERSON
'44th President' as TITLE
'United States' as GPE (Geopolitical Entity)
Explanation: The NER system identifies and
categorizes names and titles within the text.
Stemming and Lemmatization
Stemming:
o Reduces words to their base form by removing prefixes or
suffixes.
o Example:
Input Words: ['running', 'jumps', 'easily', 'fairly']
Stemmed Words: ['run', 'jump', 'easili', 'fairli']
Explanation: The words are reduced to their root
forms, which may not always be meaningful.
Lemmatization:
o Reduces words to their meaningful base form using
vocabulary and morphological analysis.
o Example:
Input Words: ['running', 'jumps', 'easily', 'fairly']
Lemmatized Words: ['run', 'jump', 'easy', 'fair']
Explanation: The words are reduced to their base or
dictionary forms, ensuring they remain meaningful.
Tagging Parts of Speech
o POS Tagging: Assigns part-of-speech tags to each word in a
sentence.
o Example:
Input Text: "The quick brown fox jumps over the
lazy dog."
POS Tags: [('The', 'DT'), ('quick', 'JJ'), ('brown', 'JJ'),
('fox', 'NN'), ('jumps', 'VBZ'), ('over', 'IN'), ('the', 'DT'),
('lazy', 'JJ'), ('dog', 'NN')]
Explanation: Each word is tagged with its
corresponding part of speech, such as determiner (DT),
adjective (JJ), noun (NN), verb (VBZ), and
preposition (IN).
Constituent Structure
o Constituent Structure Analysis: Breaks down sentences
into their sub-parts (constituents).
o Example:
Input Text: "The quick brown fox jumped over the
lazy dog."
Constituent Structure:
Sentence (S)
Noun Phrase (NP): "The quick brown
fox"
Determiner (DT): "The"
Adjectives (JJ): "quick", "brown"
Noun (NN): "fox"
Verb Phrase (VP): "jumped over the lazy
dog"
Verb (VBD): "jumped"
Prepositional Phrase (PP): "over
the lazy dog"
Preposition (IN): "over"
Noun Phrase (NP): "the lazy
dog"
Determiner (DT):
"the"
Adjective (JJ): "lazy"
Noun (NN): "dog"
Explanation: The sentence is parsed into a
hierarchical structure, showing the relationships
between words and phrases.
