Introduction to Natural Language Processing

This lecture introduces the basics of Natural Language Processing (NLP), focusing on corpus-based approaches and linguistic processing levels. It covers the challenges of constructing computationally exploitable representations from text, the interdependencies between processing levels, and the main application domains of NLP. The course aims to provide a strong background in NLP concepts, emphasizing the importance of linguistic resources and the trade-off between expressive power and processing time. Various linguistic processing levels, such as lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic, are discussed along with their interdependencies. The lecture also touches on the difficulties in NLP, the impact of power laws, and the need for good linguistic resources.