Natural language understanding is a subtopic of natural language processing in artificial intelligence that deals with machine reading comprehension.
The process of disassembling and parsing input is more complex than the reverse process of assembling output in natural language generation because of the occurrence of unknown and unexpected features in the input and the need to determine the appropriate syntactic and semantic schemes to apply to it, factors which are pre-determined when outputting language.
There is considerable commercial interest in the field because of its application to news-gathering, text categorization, voice-activation, archiving and large-scale content-analysis.
Read more about Natural Language Understanding: History, Scope and Context, Components and Architecture
Famous quotes containing the words natural and/or language:
“It is very natural that every one who makes anything inside themselves that is makes it entirely out of what is in them does naturally have to have two civilizations. They have to have the civilization that makes them and the civilization that has nothing to do with them.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“It is impossible to dissociate language from science or science from language, because every natural science always involves three things: the sequence of phenomena on which the science is based; the abstract concepts which call these phenomena to mind; and the words in which the concepts are expressed. To call forth a concept, a word is needed; to portray a phenomenon, a concept is needed. All three mirror one and the same reality.”
—Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794)