Linguistic Knowledge in Natural Language Processing

Ever since diving into Natural Language Processing (NLP), I've always wanted to write something rather introductory about it at a high level, to provide some structure in my understanding, and to give another perspective of the area -- in contrast to the popularity of doing NLP using Deep Learning. Given a sentence, traditionally the following are the different stages on how a sentence would be analyzed to gain deeper insights. At this stage we care about the words that make up the sentence, how they are formed, and how do they change depending on their context. In this stage, we focus more on the relationship of the words within a sentence -- how a sentence is constructed. To derive this understanding, syntactical analysis is usually done at a sentence-level, where as for morphology the analysis is done at word level. Once we've understood the syntactic structures, we are more prepared to get into the "meaning" of the sentence (for a fun read on what meaning can actually mean in NLP -- head over here to dive into a Twitter discussion on the subject).