CourseLog: Natural Language Processing

Coursera has a nice course on Natural Language Processing. I missed it when it started, so catching up now viewing the archives.

What makes Natural Language Processing Difficult?

1. Ambiguity in the language. This slide shows other difficulties.

nlp-why-difficult-1

2. What tools do we need?

nlp-2

My interest in NLP stems from the following:

  • A better way to make sense out of a lot of data I get from Tweets. Instead of reading each one (of even a select group) and trying to make sense, I would love to process them a bit and pick some topics and filter them. 
  • Extract entities from not only the tweets but also the links. Which companies and products are being mentioned? Why?
  • Provide a semantic layer on top of some of our information discovery and monitoring tools and increase their value.

You may have your own reasons. Whatever they are, this course may be worth checking out to get an appreciation of problems and some possible solutions.