Critical Challenges in Natural Language Processing

Abstract

In this paper, the author attempts to enlist some of the basic bottlenecks that pose challenges while designing the automation of any natural language understanding system. In the beginning, some background material on the study of language and an overview of linguistics is presented for the benefit of the reader who might be new to the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Natural language systems are also discussed briefly so as to give a better insight into the processing of natural languages by computer systems. Then the three major threats or challenges of natural language processing, viz. knowledge acquisition from natural language; interaction with multiple underlying systems; and partial understanding of multi-sentence and fragments of language are discussed.