Lecture 4

Question 1

What is Syntax in NLP?

Answer 1

Syntax is the set of rules that dictates the structure of sentences in a language, determining how words and phrases are organized.

Question 2

Define a Morpheme.

Answer 2

A morpheme is the smallest unit of language with meaning, which cannot necessarily stand alone, like prefixes and suffixes.

Question 3

What is a Lexeme?

Answer 3

A lexeme is an abstract unit of meaning representing a group of words with the same root and meaning, like “run,” “running,” “ran.”

Question 4

What is the difference between Stemming and Lemmatization?

Answer 4

Stemming reduces a word to its stem form (e.g., “running” to “run”), while lemmatization reduces it to the dictionary form (lemma), taking context into account.

Question 5

What are Compound Words?

Answer 5

Compound words are formed by combining two or more roots, such as “blackbird” (closed compound) or “credit card” (open compound).

Question 6

Name three Lexical Categories.

Answer 6

Nouns, Verbs, and Adjectives are three major lexical categories or word classes.

Question 7

What is Part-of-Speech (POS) Tagging?

Answer 7

POS tagging assigns a lexical category to each word in a sentence, helping identify the role of each word (e.g., noun, verb).

Question 8

Why is POS Tagging challenging?

Answer 8

POS tagging is challenging due to ambiguity, as some words can serve different roles (e.g., “run” as a verb or noun), requiring context to determine the correct tag.

Question 9

What is a Constituent in syntax?

Answer 9

A constituent is a group of words that function together as a single unit within a hierarchical sentence structure, such as a noun phrase or verb phrase.

Question 10

Name the five types of Phrases in syntax.

Answer 10

Noun Phrase (NP), Verb Phrase (VP), Adjective Phrase (AdjP), Adverb Phrase (AdvP), and Prepositional Phrase (PP).

Question 11

What are Phrase Structure Rules?

Answer 11

Phrase structure rules specify how phrases combine to form larger structures, like S → NP VP for sentence structure.

Question 12

Describe a Syntax Tree.

Answer 12

A syntax tree visually represents the hierarchical structure of a sentence, showing how words and phrases relate to each other.

Question 13

What is Dependency Parsing?

Answer 13

Dependency parsing analyzes the syntactic structure of a sentence by identifying relationships between words, represented as directed arcs.

Question 14

What is a Context-Free Grammar (CFG)?

Answer 14

A CFG is a set of recursive rules used to generate sentences, where each rule expands a symbol regardless of its context.

Question 15

List three types of verbs based on Grammar Rules.

Answer 15

Intransitive (no object), Transitive (one object), and Ditransitive (two objects).

Question 16

What is Construction Grammar?

Answer 16

Construction Grammar views syntax and the lexicon as interconnected, treating both words and phrases as carriers of meaning without strict hierarchical structure.

Question 17

How do Language Models handle word sequences?

Answer 17

Language models assign probabilities to sequences, predicting likely words based on context and training data.

Question 18

Define Entropy in the context of language models.

Answer 18

Entropy measures the average amount of information or uncertainty in language, quantifying how much information each word conveys.

Question 19

What is Perplexity in evaluating language models?

Answer 19

Perplexity measures a model’s uncertainty in predicting a sequence; lower perplexity indicates better predictive accuracy.

Question 20

What is Structural Priming in language models?

Answer 20

Structural priming tests if exposure to specific syntactic structures affects a model’s predictions, indicating learned structural patterns.