We will now take a closer look at the NLP way of analyzing texts.
Any communication or speech act is built from seven distinct processes: intention, generation, synthesis, and perception, analysis, disambiguation and incorporation. Of these, the first three take place in the speaker or sender, and the last four happen in the hearer's mind. In this context, only generation, analysis and disambiguation are of interest to us.

During generation, the speaker makes a choice of words or symbols appropriate to what he wants to convey to the hearer.

Analysis means that the perceived string is being processed by the hearer in order to extract the possible meanings. This consists of both syntactic interpretation (also called parsing) and semantic interpretation, taking into account the words' meaning as well as their meaning in the current situation. The result of the analysis of a syntactically correct sentence is something equivalent to a parse tree(words connected to phrases).

Disambiguation, finally, picks out the meaning that has most likely been intended by the sender, as some syntactically correct constructs allow for more than one semantic interpretation. You cannot know exactly what the sender wanted to express without having direct access to his knowledge.

On this page: 3.1 - The Grammar of Formal Languages | 3.2 - Parsing|

Natural Language Processing | Project of Multimedia Systems EECS 579 | update: 22/12/2000 | Daniele Quercia