Natural Language Processing: An Overview

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that aims to build automatic systems that can understand or produce texts in natural language. The intended audience is a non-technical reader with no particular background in linguistics or computer science. The chapter first characterizes natural language and explains why dealing with such unstructured data automatically is a challenge. Examples of typical applications of NLP are then provided ranging from low-level tasks to end-user everyday systems. As much of the work in AI, NLP has gone through three main eras: symbolic approaches, machine learning driven approaches, and more recently, deep learning driven approaches. These three paradigms will be described, with a particular emphasis on the current one, deep learning, which, in only a few years, has led to exciting results and allowed applications, such as conversational agents and machine translation, to become accessible and usable to the public.