SEM1A5 - Part 1

Titles

What is in a name?

The code for this course, SEM1A5, is meaningless unless you know the method the University of Birmingham uses to generate codes. Fortunately, the course also has an English title: Natural Language Processing.

A survey of introductory textbooks of Artificial Intelligence and dictionaries and encyclopaedias of linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence and so on, will show that there are a variety of titles applied to descriptions of much the same kind of material. The most common titles, apart from Natural Language Processing include:

Automatic Language Processing
Computational Linguistics
Natural Language Understanding

Are these different titles accidental or do they reflect different approaches to the topic?

Some titles come and go as if they were a fashion. For instance, it is very rare to hear the phrase Automatic Language Processing these days: it is more or less restricted to the titles of conferences from the 1950s and 1960s. Some titles stick because they reflect a particular view of an area. This is true of Computational Linguistics, although its scope has narrowed over the years.

Computational Linguistics: This is the application of computers to the scientific study of human language. This definition suggests that there are connections with Cognitive Science, that is to say, the study of how humans produce and understand language. Historically, Computational Linguistics has been associated with work in Generative Linguistics and formerly included the study of formal languages (eg finite state automata) and programming languages. The computer is used as a tool on which models can be developed and evaluated, for instance implementations of theories of child language acquisition.
Natural Language Processing: While Computational Linguistics can be seen as the "scientific" study of language which uses the computer as a tool, Natural Language Processing can be seen that part of the activity that seeks to deliver well-engineered systems that rely on the use of natural language. Such systems might serve as front-ends to databases so as to allow users to enter their queries in natural language rather than having to learn a database query language, or to produce programs automatically from a natural language description.
Natural Language Understanding: This title was perhaps used to distinguish a particular approach to Natural Language Processing. The people using this title tend to lay much emphasis on the meaning of the language being processed, in particular getting the computer to respond to the input in an apparently intelligent fashion. At one time, those who belonged to the Natural Language Understanding camp avoided the use of any syntactic processing, but textbooks that bear this title now include significant sections on syntactic processing, which suggests that the edge of the title has been rather blunted. (For instance, see Allen (1987; part 1).

The ideas behind the different titles can be seen as a natural part of the development of a scientific paradigm. For a brief account of this process, see Winograd (1983; pp 6-8).

What title does this course follow?

This course is mainly about Natural Language Processing, as defined above. However, when it seems appropriate, it casts sideways glances at supporting disciplines, such as Psychology, Linguistics and Computer Science.