Information Engineering Textbook Series - Vol.5 Shizen Gengo Shori (Natural Language Processing)

Natural language is the language used by people in their daily life, including Japanese, English, and Chinese, among others. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field of information engineering that aims to process natural languages using computers to achieve a useful outcome. NLP is used in web searching and automatic translations, and is highly anticipated today because text information, such as one in Web documents, is increasing rapidly. NLP also has a scientific aspect of investigating how human beings conduct language-related activities, as it is necessary to develop systems to understand and produce language modeled after their activities.
 
This is a textbook on NLP that covers different aspects and techniques of NLP, as engineering, as well as scientific aspects of languages. Students who learn about processing methods should also learn about the object of processing. It is especially important in NLP where the object is a language, an intellectual product of human beings. The content of this book consists of lessons for one semester class for undergraduates of 3rd and 4th years, as well as for graduates in master’s courses. The book includes new topics such as dependency structure analysis, and statistical machine translation, among others, which have not been extensively described in previous textbooks. Moreover, a number of exercises are included in the book. Making exercises to help learners understand semantic processing and contextual processing is difficult, and only a few problems have been provided in other textbooks. However, the author of this text did not spare any efforts in designing problems to facilitate the reader’s full understanding of these techniques.
 
Through the writing of this book, the author has again recognized the difficulties of writing textbooks. NLP techniques, similar to other technologies, have been making rapid progress. As a result, many new discoveries have been made since this book was written. In this book, the author has explained the basis for understanding the newest findings. The author hopes to write another book on those. It is the author’s desire to introduce language and language processing to everyone interested in languages, regardless of their specialties, by maintaining an optimal balance between science and engineering, which is difficult task to achieve. Nevertheless, it is hoped that this wish would be realized in the future.
 

(Written by Tsuneaki Kato, Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / 2017)