ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces key natural language processing concepts and terminology. The ultimate objective of natural language processing is to allow people to communicate with computers in much the same way they communicate with each other. Natural language processing facilitates access to a database or a knowledge base, provides a friendly user interface, facilitates language translation and conversion, and increases user productivity by supporting English-like input. Natural language processing is a major area of research within the field of artificial intelligence. The natural language processing routine is typically visualized as a shell. The user communicates with the shell by entering plain English character strings. Natural language processing will play an important role in robotic systems. Speech recognition is an extension of natural language processing. The idea is to use speech recognition routine to break continuous speech into a string of words, input the string into natural language processing routine, and then pass the resulting commands to an application program.
