Man’s greatest invention is language. It is man’s finest tool, strongest weapon, deepest resource, and largest hope. Interactions involving humans are most effectively carried out through the medium of language (Jean Paul Tremblay and Paul G Sorenson, 1987). Language permits the expression of thoughts and ideas, and without it, communication as we know it would be very difficult indeed. Language is meant for communicating about the world.
In simple applications, the language-processing step can be trivial. For isolated word recognition, all that is required is a decision mechanism between alternate words, and a reliably check to insure that the acoustic score of the best word is good enough. This would be sufficient for more complex tasks as well as if speech recognizers always made the correct decision based on acoustic information alone. Often there are similar sounding words (or homonyms) for which the grammatical and semantic structure provide disambiguation. For instance, the fragment “one cent” might be confused with “one scent” or. even “won scent” judged on acoustic information alone.
Language is meant for communicating about the world. It is the strongest soul deepest resource. By studying languages, we can come to understand more about the world. We can test our theories about the world how well they support our attempt to understand language. And, if we can succeed at building a computational model of language, we will have a powerful tool for communicating the world, in combination with liguistic facts, to build computational natural language systems.
The entire language can be divided into two categories:
1. Processing written text, using lexical, syntactic, and semantic knowledge of the language as well as the required real world information.
2. Processing the speech which we call it as spoken language, using all the information needed above plus additional knowledge about phonology as well as enough added information to handle the further ambiguities that arise in speech and spoken languages.
The steps involve d in the natural language processing are as follows:
• Morphological analysis
• Syntactic analysis
• Semantic analysis
• Discourse integration
• Pragmatic analysis