Tutorial on Techniques and Applications for Natural Language Processing.

摘要

Natural language communication with computers has long been a major goal of Artificial Intelligence both for what it can tell us about intelligence in general and for its practical utility - data bases, software packages, and Al-based expert systems all require flexible interfaces to a growing community of users who are not able or do not wish to communicate with computers in formal, artificial command languages. Whereas many of the fundamental problems of general natural language processing (NLP) by machine remain to be solved, the area has matured in recent years to the point where practical natural language interfaces to software systems can be constructed in many restricted, but nevertheless useful, circumstances. This tutorial is intended to survey the current state of applied natural language processing by presenting computationally effective NLP techniques, by discussing the range of capabilities these techniques provide for NLP systems, an by discussing their current limitations. Following the introduction, this document is divided into two major sections: the first on language recognition strategies at the single sentence level, and the second on language processing issues that arise during interactive dialogues. In both cases, we concentrate on those aspects of the problem appropriate for interactive natural language interfaces, but relate the techniques and systems discussed to more general work on natural language, independent of application domain. (KR)