Natural Language Processing - Major Tasks in NLP

Major Tasks in NLP

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. 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, 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 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.

• 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. Note that 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?").
• Relationship extraction: Given a chunk of text, identify the relationships among named entities (e.g. who is the wife of 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:

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