Part One: Warm Up
A rapidly growing field of computer science is in natural language processing. Read the following definition of natural language processing from Wikipedia, and then discuss the questions below with a partner or group.
Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of computer science, artificial intelligence and computational linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages, and, in particular, concerned with programming computers to fruitfully process large natural language corpora. Challenges in natural language processing frequently involve natural language understanding, natural language generation (frequently from formal, machine-readable logical forms), connecting language and machine perception, dialog systems, or some combination thereof.
Discussion questions:
- Are there any words you don't know? What is artificial intelligence? What is linguistics?
- What is natural language processing? Try to explain it in your own words.
- What technologies use natural language processing? Do you use any of these technologies?
- What kinds of problems do you think people have when using natural language processing technologies?
- What kinds of problems do you think developers have when creating natural language processing technologies?
The videos below each describe a different program that depends on natural language processing: Google Wave and iPhone's Siri.
Part Two: Video 1
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