Natural Language Processing Key Terms, Explained

Very broadly, natural language processing (NLP) is a discipline which is interested in how human languages, and, to some extent, the humans who speak them, interact with technology. If a document collection's words are ordered by frequency, and y is used to describe the number of times that the xth word appears, Zipf's observation is concisely captured as y cx-1/2 (item frequency is inversely proportional to item rank). Also known as meaning generation, semantic analysis is interested in determining the meaning of text selections (either character or word sequences). After an input selection of text is read and parsed (analyzed syntactically), the text selection can then be interpreted for meaning.