Notes on Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Allen B. Tucker

February, 2002

These notes provide a framework for a beginning study of contemporary issues and strategies in natural language processing.  They are accompanied by software and examples drawn from various sources.  To gain the most from these notes, readers should be familiar with general ideas in computer science and programming, including (ideally) a modest knowledge of Prolog.

1.  Overview of NLP: Issues and Strategies

2.  Prolog and NLP

Prolog tutorial
Prolog Reference Manual

3.  Word Features and Agreement Issues

4.  Syntax of Various Sentence Forms

5.  Statistical Methods for Ambiguity Resolution

6.  Semantics: Meaning Representation

7.  Application: A Question-Answering System

8.  Application: Machine Translation

9.  Application: Text Summarization

10. Application: Web Search and Data Mining

11.  The Attribute Logic Engine (ALE)

References

  1. Allen, James, Natural Language Understanding 2e, Benjamin Cummings, 1995.
  2. Charniak, Eugene, Statistical Language Learning, MIT Press, 1993.
  3. Clocksin, W. and Mellish, C., Programming in Prolog 4e, Springer, 1997.
  4. Covington, Michael, Natural Language Processing for Prolog Programmers , Prentice Hall, 1994.
  5. Cowie, J. and Lehnert, W., Information Extraction, Communications of the ACM 39, 1 (Jan 1996), 80-91.
  6. Guthrie, Louise et al., The Role of Lexicons in Natural Lnaguage Processing, Communications of the ACM 39, 1 (Jan 1996), 63-72.
  7. King, Margaret, Evaluating Natural Lnaguage Processing Systems, Communications of the ACM 39, 1 (Jan 1996), 73-79.
  8. Lewis, D. and Sparck-Jones, K., Natural Language Processing for Infromation Retrieval, Communications of the ACM 39, 1 (Jan 1996), 92-101.
  9. Manning, C. and H. Schutze, Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, MIT Press, 1999.
  10. Matthews, Clive, An Introduction to Natural Language Processing through Prolog, Longman, 1998.
  11. Pereira, F.C.N and Shieber, S, Prolog and Natural Language Analysis , CSLI, 1987.
  12. Wiebe, J et al., Language Use in Context, Communications of the ACM 39, 1 (Jan 1996), 102-111.
  13. Wilks, Yorick, Natural Language Processing, Communications of the ACM 39, 1 (Jan 1996), 60-62.
Modified: 19-Jul-1999