Introduction to NLP and the Course

This lecture provides an overview of Natural Language Processing (NLP), covering topics such as natural vs. formal languages, the difficulty of NLP, linguistic processing levels, and the impact of power laws. It explores the challenges of constructing computationally exploitable representations from text and generating natural language. The importance of linguistic resources, corpus-based linguistics, and the interdependencies between processing levels are discussed. The lecture also delves into the main application domains of NLP, the need for representative resources, and the choice of language models. Key concepts include the implicit and ambiguous nature of natural language, the functions of communication and representation, and the trade-off between expressive power and processing time.