Natural language processing

Beginning with the basic issues of NLP, this chapter aims to chart the major research activities in this area since the last ARIST Chapter in 1996 (Haas, 1996), including: (i) natural language text processing systems - text summarization, information extraction, information retrieval, etc., including domain-specific applications; (ii) natural language interfaces; (iii) NLP in the context of www and digital libraries ; and (iv) evaluation of NLP systems

A Survey of Paraphrasing and Textual Entailment Methods

Paraphrasing methods recognize, generate, or extract phrases, sentences, or longer natural language expressions that convey almost the same information. Textual entailment methods, on the other hand, recognize, generate, or extract pairs of natural language expressions, such that a human who reads (and trusts) the first element of a pair would most likely infer that the other element is also true. Paraphrasing can be seen as bidirectional textual entailment and methods from the two areas are often similar. Both kinds of methods are useful, at least in principle, in a wide range of natural language processing applications, including question answering, summarization, text generation, and machine translation. We summarize key ideas from the two areas by considering in turn recognition, generation, and extraction methods, also pointing to prominent articles and resources.Comment: Technical Report, Natural Language Processing Group, Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece, 201

Dialogue based interfaces for universal access.

Conversation provides an excellent means of communication for almost all people. Consequently, a conversational interface is an excellent mechanism for allowing people to interact with systems. Conversational systems are an active research area, but a wide range of systems can be developed with current technology. More sophisticated interfaces can take considerable effort, but simple interfaces can be developed quite rapidly. This paper gives an introduction to the current state of the art of conversational systems and interfaces. It describes a methodology for developing conversational interfaces and gives an example of an interface for a state benefits web site. The paper discusses how this interface could improve access for a wide range of people, and how further development of this interface would allow a larger range of people to use the system and give them more functionality

Finding Structured and Unstructured Features to Improve the Search Result of Complex Question

-Recently, search engine got challenge deal with such a natural language questions. Sometimes, these questions are complex questions. A complex question is a question that consists several clauses, several intentions or need long answer. In this work we proposed that finding structured features and unstructured features of questions and using structured data and unstructured data could improve the search result of complex questions. According to those, we will use two approaches, IR approach and structured retrieval, QA template. Our framework consists of three parts. Question analysis, Resource Discovery and Analysis The Relevant Answer. In Question Analysis we used a few assumptions, and tried to find structured and unstructured features of the questions. Structured feature refers to Structured data and unstructured feature refers to unstructured data. In the resource discovery we integrated structured data (relational database) and unstructured data (webpage) to take the advantaged of two kinds of data to improve and reach the relevant answer. We will find the best top fragments from context of the webpage In the Relevant Answer part, we made a score matching between the result from structured data and unstructured data, then finally used QA template to reformulate the question. In the experiment result, it shows that using structured feature and unstructured feature and using both structured and unstructured data, using approach IR and QA template could improve the search result of complex questions