The Main Approaches to Natural Language Processing Tasks

We have previously discussed a number of introductory topics in natural language processing (NLP), and I had planned at this point to move forward with covering some some useful, practical applications. It then came to my attention that I had overlooked a couple of important introductory discussions which were likely needed prior to moving ahead. The first of those topics is will be covered here, more of a general discussion on the approaches to natural language processing tasks which are common today. This also brings up the question: specifically, what types of NLP tasks are there? The other fundamental topic which has been pointed out to me as being overlooked will be covered next week, and that will be address the common question of "how do we represent text for machine learning systems?"