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Natural Language is the language humans are using. The field of NLP can be seen as conducting research about building computer programs that process human languages for specific purposes. NLP includes several levels from morphology (word-level phenomenon) to pragmatics (interpretation of sentences in a context) and discourse and can be divided into the analysis and generation processes. In order to write a program for processing human languages, there should be a compuational model for it. Since the best model we currently have for human language processing is the human, NLP or computational linguistics field is tightly related with various other fields like linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive science, philosophy as well as computer science. From the scientific view point, the major motivation for NLP is to understand the linguistic phenomena. Computational models can test various theories about such phenomena and the structure of the languages and predict the linguistically-oriented human behaviors. From the more practical engineering point of view, NLP allows for overcoming the current limitations of using computers and helps humans improve information processing capabilities. Examples include: a user interface that allows humans to communicate with computers using a human language; a system that not only retrieves information but also extracts necessary facts and/or provides a summary; and a translation system between multiple languages. |
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