What Is Statistical Natural Language Processing?

Statistical NLP aims to do statistical inference for the field of natural language. Statistical inference in general consists of taking some data (generated in accordance with some unknown probability distribution) and then making some inference about this distribution.22 Sept 2017

Statistical Natural Language Processing

Reference work entry

First Online: 02 December 2014

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04898-2_82

3 Citations 571 Downloads
Natural language processing

(

NLP

) is a field of artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. It refers to a technology that creates and implements ways of executing various tasks concerning natural language (such as designing natural language based interfaces with databases, machine translation, etc.). NLP applications belong to three main categories:

1.

Text-based applications (such as knowledge acquisition, information retrieval, information extraction, text summarization, machine translation, etc.)

2.

Dialog-based applications (such as learning systems, question answering systems, etc.)

3.

Speech processing (although NLP may refer to both text and speech, work on speech processing has gradually evolved into a separate field)

Natural language engineering deals with the implementation of large-scale natural language–based systems. It refers to the related field of Human Language Technology (HLT).

NLP represents a difficult...