ABSTRACT
Computerprocessingofnatural languagenormally follows a sequenceof steps, beginningwith aphonemeand morpheme-based analysis and stepping toward semantics and discourse analyses. Although some of the steps can be interwoven depending on the requirements of an application (e.g., doing word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging together in languages like Chinese), dividing the analysis into distinct stages adds to the modularity of the process and helps in identifying the problems peculiar to each stage more clearly. Each step aims at solving the problems at that level of processing and feeding the next level with an accurate stream of data.
