Natural Language Processing Tools

Introduction

Communication is an essential to the existence of modern man. Computers are also an essential aspect of our current information age. As such, it is a natural progression from the development of the modern computer as a computational and modeling tool, to computer artificial intelligence, to the investigation of natural language processing. Natural Language Processing (NLP) comes from the concept of humans communicating with non-human devices. NLP is a technique through which a computer can close the gap between artificial intelligence and pure machine by processing human to human communication messages previously unrecognizable to machines. (Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science in which machines are programmed to mimic human learning and decision making. NLP aids artificial intelligence by allowing human languages to be processed by machines, and the machines to learn syntaxes and vocabulary of these languages.) Programmers have developed NLP tools to facilitate the parsing, analyzing, understanding, and generation of human languages by, or with assistance from, computers. These tools range from those that recognize and respond to human voice commands to those that create human-like speech and further to those that can parse and understand written text. This chapter will provide variety types of NLP tools along with background, algorithms, usages, and examples.

This chapter will cover NLP tools in the following categories: parser, understanding, and generation. Finally, speech recognition is briefly discussed.