‫معالجة اللغات الطبيعية‬

(١٢) ‫محاضرة‬ ‫رابعة حاسب‬

‫ أحمد الحربي‬/‫دكتور‬

• How to learn the meaning of words?

• From dictionaries:

plant, works, industrial plant -- (buildings for carrying on industrial

labor; "they built a large plant to manufacture automobiles")
plant, flora, plant life -- (a living organism lacking the power of
locomotion)

They are producing about 1,000 automobiles in the new plant

The sea flora consists in 1,000 different plant species
The plant was close to the farm of animals.

Learning?

– Assume a (large) amount of annotated data = training

– Assume a new text not annotated = test
• Learn from previous experience (training) to classify new data (test)
• Decision trees, memory based learning, neural networks
– Machine Learning
Which one performs best?

Information Retrieve

• Retrieve specific information

• Question Answering
• “What is the height of mount Everest?”
• 11,000 feet
• “What is the minimum age requirement for car rental in Italy?”

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 Machine Translations

• How to translate text?

– Learn from previously translated data
• Æ Need parallel corpora
• How to obtain parallel texts?
– From the Web! How?
– From Web users! How?
• Once we have the texts, how to get most out of them?
– Word alignments
– Obtain lexicons
– Import knowledge from well studied languages

Applications

• Word count?
– When it counts words: Yes
• To count words you need to know what a word is. That’s
knowledge of language.
– When it counts lines and bytes: No
• Lines and bytes are computer artifacts, not linguistic entities

Big Applications

• Question answering
• Conversational agents
• Summarization
• Machine translation

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NLP has an AI aspect to it:

– We’re often dealing with ill-defined problems

– We don’t often come up with perfect solutions/algorithms
– We can’t let either of those facts get in our way

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