From f3f88efa0409e2c051983f00fdae6422ade8ee50 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jen Looper Date: Mon, 24 May 2021 17:50:47 -0400 Subject: [PATCH] few edits per review --- NLP/1-Introduction-to-NLP/README.md | 6 +++--- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) diff --git a/NLP/1-Introduction-to-NLP/README.md b/NLP/1-Introduction-to-NLP/README.md index aefba871..dcc0178c 100644 --- a/NLP/1-Introduction-to-NLP/README.md +++ b/NLP/1-Introduction-to-NLP/README.md @@ -13,11 +13,11 @@ This lesson covers a brief history and important concepts of *Computational Ling You will learn about how the ideas about languages developed and what the major areas of study have been. You will also learn definitions and concepts about how computers process text, including parsing, grammar, and identifying nouns and verbs. There are some coding tasks in this lesson, and several important concepts are introduced that you will learn to code later on in the next lessons. -Computational linguistics is an area of research and development over many decades that studies how computers can work with, and even understand, translate, and communicate with languages. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a related field focused on how computers can process 'natural', or human, languages. If you have ever dictated to your phone instead of typing, or asked a virtual assistant a question, your speech was converted into a text form and then processed or *parsed* from the language you spoke into a format that the phone or assistant could understand and act on. +Computational linguistics is an area of research and development over many decades that studies how computers can work with, and even understand, translate, and communicate with languages. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a related field focused on how computers can process 'natural', or human, languages. If you have ever dictated to your phone instead of typing or asked a virtual assistant a question, your speech was converted into a text form and then processed or *parsed* from the language you spoke. The detected keywords were then processed into a format that the phone or assistant could understand and act on. -This is possible because a coder wrote a program to do this. A few decades ago, some science fiction writers predicted that people would mostly speak to their computers, and the computers would always understand exactly what they meant. Sadly, it turned out to be a harder problem that many imagined, and while it is a much better understood problem today, there are significant challenges in achieving 'perfect' natural language processing when it comes to understanding the meaning of a sentence. This is a particularly hard problem when it comes to understanding humour or detecting emotions such as sarcasm in a sentence. +This is possible because someone wrote a computer program to do this. A few decades ago, some science fiction writers predicted that people would mostly speak to their computers, and the computers would always understand exactly what they meant. Sadly, it turned out to be a harder problem that many imagined, and while it is a much better understood problem today, there are significant challenges in achieving 'perfect' natural language processing when it comes to understanding the meaning of a sentence. This is a particularly hard problem when it comes to understanding humour or detecting emotions such as sarcasm in a sentence. -At this point, you may be remembering school classes where the teacher covered the parts of grammar in a sentence. In some countries, students are taught grammar and linguistics as a dedicated subject, but in many, these topics are included as part of learning a language: either your first language in primary school (learning to read and write) and perhaps a second language in post-primary, or high school. Don't worry if you are not an expert at differentiating nouns from verbs, or adverbs from adjectives! +At this point, you may be remembering school classes where the teacher covered the parts of grammar in a sentence. In some countries, students are taught grammar and linguistics as a dedicated subject, but in many, these topics are included as part of learning a language: either your first language in primary school (learning to read and write) and perhaps a second language in post-primary, or high school. Don't worry if you are not an expert at differentiating nouns from verbs or adverbs from adjectives! If you struggle with the difference between the *simple present* and *present progressive*, you are not alone. This is a challenging thing for many people, even native speakers of a language. The good news is that computers are really good at applying formal rules, and you will learn to write code that can *parse* a sentence as well as a human. The greater challenge you will examine later is understanding the *meaning*, and *sentiment*, of a sentence. ## Prerequisites