Natural language processing

Natural language processing is a field of computer science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. As such, NLP is related to the area of human–computer interaction. Many challenges in NLP involve: natural language understanding, enabling computers to derive meaning from human or natural language input; and others involve natural language generation.

An automated online assistant providing customer service on a web page, an example of an application where natural language processing is a major component.^[1]

History

The history of NLP generally starts in the 1950s, although work can be found from earlier periods. In 1950, Alan Turing published an article titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" which proposed what is now called the Turing test as a criterion of intelligence.

The Georgetown experiment in 1954 involved fully automatic translation of more than sixty Russian sentences into English. The authors claimed that within three or five years, machine translation would be a solved problem.^[2] However, real progress was much slower, and after the ALPAC report in 1966, which found that ten-year-long research had failed to fulfill the expectations, funding for machine translation was dramatically reduced. Little further research in machine translation was conducted until the late 1980s, when the first statistical machine translation systems were developed.

Some notably successful NLP systems developed in the 1960s were SHRDLU, a natural language system working in restricted "blocks worlds" with restricted vocabularies, and ELIZA, a simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist, written by Joseph Weizenbaum between 1964 and 1966. Using almost no information about human thought or emotion, ELIZA sometimes provided a startlingly human-like interaction. When the "patient" exceeded the very small knowledge base, ELIZA might provide a generic response, for example, responding to "My head hurts" with "Why do you say your head hurts?".

During the 1970s many programmers began to write "conceptual ontologies", which structured real-world information into computer-understandable data. Examples are MARGIE (Schank, 1975), SAM (Cullingford, 1978), PAM (Wilensky, 1978), TaleSpin (Meehan, 1976), QUALM (Lehnert, 1977), Politics (Carbonell, 1979), and Plot Units (Lehnert 1981). During this time, many chatterbots were written including PARRY, Racter, and Jabberwacky.

Up to the 1980s, most NLP systems were based on complex sets of hand-written rules. Starting in the late 1980s, however, there was a revolution in NLP with the introduction of machine learning algorithms for language processing. This was due to both the steady increase in computational power (see Moore's Law) and the gradual lessening of the dominance of Chomskyan theories of linguistics (e.g. transformational grammar), whose theoretical underpinnings discouraged the sort of corpus linguistics that underlies the machine-learning approach to language processing.^[3] Some of the earliest-used machine learning algorithms, such as decision trees, produced systems of hard if-then rules similar to existing hand-written rules. However, part-of-speech tagging introduced the use of hidden Markov models to NLP, and increasingly, research has focused on statistical models, which make soft, probabilistic decisions based on attaching real-valued weights to the features making up the input data. The cache language models upon which many speech recognition systems now rely are examples of such statistical models. Such models are generally more robust when given unfamiliar input, especially input that contains errors (as is very common for real-world data), and produce more reliable results when integrated into a larger system comprising multiple subtasks.

Many of the notable early successes occurred in the field of machine translation, due especially to work at IBM Research, where successively more complicated statistical models were developed. These systems were able to take advantage of existing multilingual textual corpora that had been produced by the Parliament of Canada and the European Union as a result of laws calling for the translation of all governmental proceedings into all official languages of the corresponding systems of government. However, most other systems depended on corpora specifically developed for the tasks implemented by these systems, which was (and often continues to be) a major limitation in the success of these systems. As a result, a great deal of research has gone into methods of more effectively learning from limited amounts of data.

Recent research has increasingly focused on unsupervised and semi-supervised learning algorithms. Such algorithms are able to learn from data that has not been hand-annotated with the desired answers, or using a combination of annotated and non-annotated data. Generally, this task is much more difficult than supervised learning, and typically produces less accurate results for a given amount of input data. However, there is an enormous amount of non-annotated data available (including, among other things, the entire content of the World Wide Web), which can often make up for the inferior results.

Using machine learning

Modern NLP algorithms are based on machine learning, especially statistical machine learning. The paradigm of machine learning is different from that of most prior attempts at language processing. Prior implementations of language-processing tasks typically involved the direct hand coding of large sets of rules. The machine-learning paradigm calls instead for using general learning algorithms — often, although not always, grounded in statistical inference — to automatically learn such rules through the analysis of large corpora of typical real-world examples. A corpus (plural, "corpora") is a set of documents (or sometimes, individual sentences) that have been hand-annotated with the correct values to be learned.

Many different classes of machine learning algorithms have been applied to NLP tasks. These algorithms take as input a large set of "features" that are generated from the input data. Some of the earliest-used algorithms, such as decision trees, produced systems of hard if-then rules similar to the systems of hand-written rules that were then common. Increasingly, however, research has focused on statistical models, which make soft, probabilistic decisions based on attaching real-valued weights to each input feature. Such models have the advantage that they can express the relative certainty of many different possible answers rather than only one, producing more reliable results when such a model is included as a component of a larger system.

Systems based on machine-learning algorithms have many advantages over hand-produced rules:

• The learning procedures used during machine learning automatically focus on the most common cases, whereas when writing rules by hand it is often not at all obvious where the effort should be directed.
• Automatic learning procedures can make use of statistical inference algorithms to produce models that are robust to unfamiliar input (e.g. containing words or structures that have not been seen before) and to erroneous input (e.g. with misspelled words or words accidentally omitted). Generally, handling such input gracefully with hand-written rules — or more generally, creating systems of hand-written rules that make soft decisions — is extremely difficult, error-prone and time-consuming.
• Systems based on automatically learning the rules can be made more accurate simply by supplying more input data. However, systems based on hand-written rules can only be made more accurate by increasing the complexity of the rules, which is a much more difficult task. In particular, there is a limit to the complexity of systems based on hand-crafted rules, beyond which the systems become more and more unmanageable. However, creating more data to input to machine-learning systems simply requires a corresponding increase in the number of man-hours worked, generally without significant increases in the complexity of the annotation process.

The subfield of NLP devoted to learning approaches is known as natural language learning (NLL) and its conference CoNLL^[4] and peak body SIGNLL^[5] are sponsored by ACL, recognizing also their links with computational linguistics and Language Acquisition. When the aim of computational language learning research is to understand more about human language acquisition, or psycholinguistics, NLL overlaps into the related field of computational psycholinguistics.

Major tasks

The following is a list of some of the most commonly researched tasks in NLP. Note that some of these tasks have direct real-world applications, while others more commonly serve as subtasks that are used to aid in solving larger tasks. What distinguishes these tasks from other potential and actual NLP tasks is not only the volume of research devoted to them but the fact that for each one there is typically a well-defined problem setting, a standard metric for evaluating the task, standard corpora on which the task can be evaluated, and competitions devoted to the specific task.

Automatic summarization

Produce a readable summary of a chunk of text. Often used to provide summaries of text of a known type, such as articles in the financial section of a newspaper.

Coreference resolution

Given a sentence or larger chunk of text, determine which words ("mentions") refer to the same objects ("entities"). Anaphora resolution is a specific example of this task, and is specifically concerned with matching up pronouns with the nouns or names that they refer to. The more general task of coreference resolution also includes identifying so-called "bridging relationships" involving referring expressions. For example, in a sentence such as "He entered John's house through the front door", "the front door" is a referring expression and the bridging relationship to be identified is the fact that the door being referred to is the front door of John's house (rather than of some other structure that might also be referred to).

Discourse analysis

This rubric includes a number of related tasks. One task is identifying the discourse structure of connected text, i.e. the nature of the discourse relationships between sentences (e.g. elaboration, explanation, contrast). Another possible task is recognizing and classifying the speech acts in a chunk of text (e.g. yes-no question, content question, statement, assertion, etc.).

Machine translation

Automatically translate text from one human language to another. This is one of the most difficult problems, and is a member of a class of problems colloquially termed "AI-complete", i.e. requiring all of the different types of knowledge that humans possess (grammar, semantics, facts about the real world, etc.) in order to solve properly.

Morphological segmentation

Separate words into individual morphemes and identify the class of the morphemes. The difficulty of this task depends greatly on the complexity of the morphology (i.e. the structure of words) of the language being considered. English has fairly simple morphology, especially inflectional morphology, and thus it is often possible to ignore this task entirely and simply model all possible forms of a word (e.g. "open, opens, opened, opening") as separate words. In languages such as Turkish or Meitei,^[6] a highly agglutinated Indian language, however, such an approach is not possible, as each dictionary entry has thousands of possible word forms.

Named entity recognition (NER)

Given a stream of text, determine which items in the text map to proper names, such as people or places, and what the type of each such name is (e.g. person, location, organization). Note that, although capitalization can aid in recognizing named entities in languages such as English, this information cannot aid in determining the type of named entity, and in any case is often inaccurate or insufficient. For example, the first word of a sentence is also capitalized, and named entities often span several words, only some of which are capitalized. Furthermore, many other languages in non-Western scripts (e.g. Chinese or Arabic) do not have any capitalization at all, and even languages with capitalization may not consistently use it to distinguish names. For example, German capitalizes all nouns, regardless of whether they refer to names, and French and Spanish do not capitalize names that serve as adjectives.

Natural language generation

Convert information from computer databases or semantic intents into readable human language.

Natural language understanding

Convert chunks of text into more formal representations such as first-order logic structures that are easier for computer programs to manipulate. Natural language understanding involves the identification of the intended semantic from the multiple possible semantics which can be derived from a natural language expression which usually takes the form of organized notations of natural languages concepts. Introduction and creation of language metamodel and ontology are efficient however empirical solutions. An explicit formalization of natural languages semantics without confusions with implicit assumptions such as closed-world assumption (CWA) vs. open-world assumption, or subjective Yes/No vs. objective True/False is expected for the construction of a basis of semantics formalization.^[7]

Optical character recognition (OCR)

Given an image representing printed text, determine the corresponding text.

Part-of-speech tagging

Given a sentence, determine the part of speech for each word. Many words, especially common ones, can serve as multiple parts of speech. For example, "book" can be a noun ("the book on the table") or verb ("to book a flight"); "set" can be a noun, verb or adjective; and "out" can be any of at least five different parts of speech. Some languages have more such ambiguity than others. Languages with little inflectional morphology, such as English are particularly prone to such ambiguity. Chinese is prone to such ambiguity because it is a tonal language during verbalization. Such inflection is not readily conveyed via the entities employed within the orthography to convey intended meaning.

Parsing

Determine the parse tree (grammatical analysis) of a given sentence. The grammar for natural languages is ambiguous and typical sentences have multiple possible analyses. In fact, perhaps surprisingly, for a typical sentence there may be thousands of potential parses (most of which will seem completely nonsensical to a human).

Question answering

Given a human-language question, determine its answer. Typical questions have a specific right answer (such as "What is the capital of Canada?"), but sometimes open-ended questions are also considered (such as "What is the meaning of life?"). Recent works have looked at even more complex questions.^[8]

Relationship extraction

Given a chunk of text, identify the relationships among named entities (e.g. who is married to whom).

Sentence breaking (also known as sentence boundary disambiguation)

Given a chunk of text, find the sentence boundaries. Sentence boundaries are often marked by periods or other punctuation marks, but these same characters can serve other purposes (e.g. marking abbreviations).

Sentiment analysis

Extract subjective information usually from a set of documents, often using online reviews to determine "polarity" about specific objects. It is especially useful for identifying trends of public opinion in the social media, for the purpose of marketing.

Speech recognition

Given a sound clip of a person or people speaking, determine the textual representation of the speech. This is the opposite of text to speech and is one of the extremely difficult problems colloquially termed "AI-complete" (see above). In natural speech there are hardly any pauses between successive words, and thus speech segmentation is a necessary subtask of speech recognition (see below). Note also that in most spoken languages, the sounds representing successive letters blend into each other in a process termed coarticulation, so the conversion of the analog signal to discrete characters can be a very difficult process.

Speech segmentation

Given a sound clip of a person or people speaking, separate it into words. A subtask of speech recognition and typically grouped with it.

Topic segmentation and recognition

Given a chunk of text, separate it into segments each of which is devoted to a topic, and identify the topic of the segment.

Word segmentation

Separate a chunk of continuous text into separate words. For a language like English, this is fairly trivial, since words are usually separated by spaces. However, some written languages like Chinese, Japanese and Thai do not mark word boundaries in such a fashion, and in those languages text segmentation is a significant task requiring knowledge of the vocabulary and morphology of words in the language.

Word sense disambiguation

Many words have more than one meaning; we have to select the meaning which makes the most sense in context. For this problem, we are typically given a list of words and associated word senses, e.g. from a dictionary or from an online resource such as WordNet.

In some cases, sets of related tasks are grouped into subfields of NLP that are often considered separately from NLP as a whole. Examples include:

Information retrieval (IR)

This is concerned with storing, searching and retrieving information. It is a separate field within computer science (closer to databases), but IR relies on some NLP methods (for example, stemming). Some current research and applications seek to bridge the gap between IR and NLP.

Information extraction (IE)

This is concerned in general with the extraction of semantic information from text. This covers tasks such as named entity recognition, Coreference resolution, relationship extraction, etc.

Speech processing

This covers speech recognition, text-to-speech and related tasks.

Other tasks include:

• Native-language identification
• Stemming
• Text simplification
• Text-to-speech
• Text-proofing
• Natural language search
• Query expansion
• Automated essay scoring
• Truecasing

Statistical

Statistical natural-language processing uses stochastic, probabilistic, and statistical methods to resolve some of the difficulties discussed above, especially those which arise because longer sentences are highly ambiguous when processed with realistic grammars, yielding thousands or millions of possible analyses. Methods for disambiguation often involve the use of corpora and Markov models. The ESPRIT Project P26 (1984 - 1988), led by CSELT, explored the problem of speech recognition comparing knowledge-based approach and statistical ones: the chosen result was a completely statistical model.^[9] One among the first models of statistical natural language understanding was introduced in 1991 by Roberto Pieraccini, Esther Levin, and Chin-Hui Lee from Bell Laboratories.^[10] NLP comprises all quantitative approaches to automated language processing, including probabilistic modeling, information theory, and linear algebra.^[11] The technology for statistical NLP comes mainly from machine learning and data mining, both of which are fields of artificial intelligence that involve learning from data.

Evaluation

Objectives

The goal of NLP evaluation is to measure one or more qualities of an algorithm or a system, in order to determine: whether the algorithm answers the goals of its designers, or if the system meets the needs of its users. Research in NLP evaluation has received considerable attention, because the definition of proper evaluation criteria is one way to specify precisely an NLP problem. The metric of NLP evaluation on an algorithmic system allows for the integration of language understanding and language generation. A precise set of evaluation criteria, which include mainly evaluation data and evaluation metrics can enable several teams to compare their solutions for a given NLP problem.

Timeline of evaluation

• In 1983, start of Esprit P26 Project, that evaluated Speech Technologies (including general topic such as Syntactic & Semantic Parsing, etc.) comparing rule-based towards statistical approaches.^[12]
• In 1987, the first evaluation campaign on written texts seems to be a campaign dedicated to message understanding (Pallet 1998).
• The Parseval/GEIG project compared phrase-structure grammars (Black 1991).
• There were series of campaigns within Tipster project on tasks like summarization, translation, and searching (Hirschman 1998).
• In 1994, in Germany, the Morpholympics compared German morphological taggers.
• The Senseval & Romanseval campaigns were conducted with the objectives of semantic disambiguation.
• In 1996, the Sparkle campaign compared syntactic parsers in four different languages (English, French, German and Italian).
• In France, the Grace project compared a set of 21 taggers for French in 1997 (Adda 1999).
• In 2004, during the Technolangue/Easy project, 13 parsers for French were compared.
• Large-scale evaluation of dependency parsers were performed in the context of the CoNLL shared tasks in 2006 and 2007.
• In France, within the ANR-Passage project (end of 2007), 10 parsers for French were compared – passage web site.
• In Italy, the EVALITA campaign was conducted in 2007,^[13] 2009, 2011, and 2014^[14] to compare various NLP and speech tools for Italian – EVALITA web site.

Different types of evaluation

Depending on the evaluation procedures, a number of distinctions are traditionally made in NLP evaluation.

Intrinsic v. extrinsic evaluation

Intrinsic evaluation considers an isolated NLP system and characterizes its performance with respect to a gold standard result as defined by the evaluators. Extrinsic evaluation, also called evaluation in use, considers the NLP system in a more complex setting as either an embedded system or a precise function for a human user. The extrinsic performance of the system is then characterized in terms of utility with respect to the overall task of the extraneous system or the human user. For example, consider a syntactic parser which is based on the output of some part of speech (POS) tagger. An intrinsic evaluation would run the POS tagger on structured data, and compare the system output of the POS tagger to the gold standard output. An extrinsic evaluation would run the parser with some other POS tagger, and then with the novel POS tagger, and compare the parsing accuracy.

Black-box v. glass-box evaluation

Black-box evaluation requires someone to run an NLP system on a sample data set and to measure a number of parameters related to: the quality of the process, such as speed, reliability, resource consumption; and most importantly, the quality of the result, such as the accuracy of data annotation or the fidelity of a translation. Glass-box evaluation looks at the: design of the system; the algorithms that are implemented; the linguistic resources it uses, like vocabulary size or expression set cardinality. Given the complexity of NLP problems, it is often difficult to predict performance only on the basis of glass-box evaluation; but this type of evaluation is more informative with respect to error analysis or future developments of a system.

Automatic v. manual evaluation

In many cases, automatic procedures can be defined to evaluate an NLP system by comparing its output with the gold standard one. Although the cost of reproducing the gold standard can be quite high, bootstrapping automatic evaluation on the same input data can be repeated as often as needed without inordinate additional costs. However, for many NLP problems the precise definition of a gold standard is a complex task and it can prove impossible when inter-annotator agreement is insufficient. Manual evaluation is best performed by human judges instructed to estimate the quality of a system, or most often of a sample of its output, based on a number of criteria. Although, thanks to their linguistic competence, human judges can be considered as the reference for a number of language processing tasks, there is also considerable variation across their ratings. That is why automatic evaluation is sometimes referred to as objective evaluation while the human evaluation is perspective.

Standardization

An ISO subcommittee is working in order to ease interoperability between lexical resources and NLP programs. The subcommittee is part of ISO/TC37 and is called ISO/TC37/SC4. Some ISO standards are already published but most of them are under construction, mainly on lexicon representation (see LMF), annotation, and data category registry.

See also

References

Further reading