Natural Language Processing

Question 1

Give 2 examples of recent significant advances in NLP.

Answer 1

IBM’s Watson & Apple’s Siri

Question 2

What does the speaker do when communicating?

Answer 2

Intention - decide when and what information should be transmitted.

Generation - translate the information to be communicated into the desired natural language

Synthesis - output the string as desired

Question 3

What does the hearer do when communicating?

Answer 3

Perception - map input modality to a string of words

Analysis - determine the information content of the string

Incorporation - decide whether or not to believe the string content and add it to the KB (knowledge base)

Question 4

What are the 3 types of analysis the hearer can do? Explain them.

Answer 4

Syntactic interpretation (parsing) - find the correct parse tree showing the phrase structure of the string (the proper ordering of words and its effect on meaning)

Semantic interpretation - extract the (literal) meaning of the string (logical form)

Pragmatic interpretation - consider effect of the overall context of altering the literal meaning of a sentence.

Question 5

Describe modular comprehension.

Answer 5

(sound waves) --> 
ACOUSTIC/PHONETIC
(words) --> 
SYNTAX 
(parse trees) --> 
SEMANTICS 
(literal meaning) --> 
PRAGMATICS 
(meaning (contextualised) -->

Question 6

Name 3 ways in which language can be ambiguous.

Answer 6

Ubiquitous (things can sound the same), explosive (different meanings depending on emphasis), humour (jokes reply on ambiguity).

Question 7

What is CORPORA?

Answer 7

Large collections of text annotated with linguistic information.

Question 8

What are bigrams?

Answer 8

They predict the word that follows, given previous ones.