Idea Transcript
11-20-2013
Natural Language Understanding Read: AIMA Chapters 22 & 23
HW#8, due Monday, 11/25
What are some of the most impressive technologies in futuristic Science Fiction? e.g. consider Star Trek One is the “Universal Translator”
Science behind Watson Three key capabilities Natural
Language Understanding Hypothesis Generation Evidence-based Learning
NLP is a discipline that aims to build computer systems that will be able to analyze, understand and generate human speech. NLP subareas of research are: Speech
Recognition (speech analysis), Speech Synthesis (speech generation), and Natural Language Understanding (NLU).
Putting meaning to the words Input might be speech or could be typed in Holy grail of Artificial Intelligence problems
Georgetown University: “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” English to Russian
Russian to English
“The vodka is good but the meat has spoiled.”
Consider the following conversation between Mary and Tom: Tom: “Who do you like tonight, Boston or LA?”
Mary: “Lakers. You?” Tom: “Come on Mary, LA can’t handle Bird.” Mary: “I’ve got a five that says Magic will shut him down.”
Problem: English sentences are incomplete descriptions of the info they are intended to convey.
I called Linda to ask her to the movies. She said she’d love to go.
but… speakers can be vague or precise; can leave out details that the hearer is expected to know
Problem: The same expression means different things in different contexes. Where’s the water?
but…
can communicate about an infinite world with a finite number of symbols
Problem: New words, expressions and meanings evolve. I’ll fax it to you. In the 1600s, St. Paul’s cathedral was said to be “amusing, awful and artificial.” “Selfie” named by Oxford dictionaries as word of the year 2013.
but… languages can evolve as experiences change
Problem: There are a lot of ways of saying the same thing. Mary was born on March 27th. Mary’s birthday is March 27th.
but… when you know a lot, facts imply each other
Speech recognition is the process of converting spoken language to written text or some similar form. Speech synthesis is the process of converting the text into spoken language.
Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a process of analysis of recognized words and transforming them into data meaningful to computer.
Other words, NLU is a computer based system that “understands” human language. NLU is used in combination with speech recognition.
■ Three major issues involved in understanding language A
large amount of human knowledge is assumed Language is pattern based: phonemes are components of words and words make phrases and sentences. Language acts are the product of agents, either human or computer
■ Terry Winograd’s SHRDLU(Winograd 1972) Early
AI programs made progress by restricting the focus to microworld
SHRDLU could respond to English queries What is sitting on the red block? What shape is the blue block on the table? Place the green pyramid on the red brick.
Language is a complicated phenomenon, involving processes as varied as the recognition of sounds or printed letters, syntactic parsing, high-level semantic inferences, and even the communication of emotional content through rhythm and inflection. To manage this complexity, linguists have defined different levels of analysis for natural language.
NLP Pipeline speech
text
Phonetic/Phonological Analysis
OCR/Tokenization
Morphological analysis Syntactic analysis Semantic Interpretation Discourse Processing
Phonology
Syntax
Semantics Pragmatics & World Knowledge
Prosody: dealing with inflection, stress, pitch, timing Phonology: examining sounds combined to form language, important for speech recognition and generation Morphology: concerned with morphemes making up words. These include rules governing the formation of words. Important in determining the role of a word in a sentence in most languages in the world. Morphological
apple.”
anomaly: “The computer eated an
Syntax: dealing with rules for combining words into legal phrases and sentences Syntactic
anomaly: “The computer ate apple.” “An the ate apple computer.”
Semantics: considers meaning of words, phrases, and sentences also ways in which meaning is conveyed in natural language Semantic
anomaly: “The computer ate an apple.”
Pragmatics: dealing with ways in which language is used and its effects on the listener you know the time?” Pragmatic anomaly: “Next year, all taxes will disappear.” “Do
World knowledge: includes knowledge of physical world, is essential to understand the full meaning of a text pen is in the box.” versus “The box is in the pen.” “The
Lazy
Contented
Colorless
Green
Cats
Sleep
Peacefully
Ideas
Sleep
Furiously
Squad helps dog bite victim. Helicopter powered by human flies. I ate spaghetti with meatballs. … with salad. … with abandon. … with a fork … with a friend. Ambiguity can be lexical, syntactic, semantic, or referential
S NP John saw
S
VP V
NP
NP Art
N
a boy
John
PP
VP V
saw Art
in a park
NP N
PP with a telescope
a boy
PP
PP
in a park
with a telescope S
John saw a boy in a park with a telescope.
NP John saw
VP V
NP Art
N
a boy
PP in a park
PP with a telescope
S
S NP
John saw
NP
VP
V
John
NP Art
N
a boy
VP V
saw Art
PP
NP
PP
N
PP with a telescope
a boy
in a park
in a park
S
PP NP
with a statue John
saw
VP V
NP Art
N
a boy
PP
PP
in a park
with a dog
Identify all noun phrases that refer to the same entity John Simon, Chief Financial Officer of Prime Corp. since 1986, saw his pay jump 20%, to $1.3 million,
as the 37-year-old also became the financialservices company’s president... Best results: F-measure of 70.4 (MUC-6) and 63.4 (MUC-7) [Ng & Cardie, 2002]
Advances in software and hardware create NLP needs for information retrieval (web), machine translation, spelling and grammar checking, speech recognition and synthesis. Stochastic and symbolic methods combine for real world applications.
Speech Processing
A Voice Interface
Some Applications ■Information Retrieval: Web search (uni- or multi-lingual) ■Query Answering/ Dialogue, e.g., Chat-80 ■Report Generation: English/French weather report ■Foreign Language Training: Spanish/Arabic tutorial systems for military linguists ■Machine Translation : Babelfish on Yahoo
“I would like to fly to Seattle tomorrow.”
Speech Recognizer
Natural Language Understanding
“When would you like to leave?”
Domain Knowledge Dialog Manager
Speech Synthesizer
Natural Language Generator
What is speech?
Vibrations of vocal cords creates sound “ahh” Mouth, throat, tongue, lips shape sound
English speech 40
phonemes; 24 consonants, 16 vowels
Sounds transmit “language”
Speech does not equal written language
"I told him to go back where he came from, but he wouldn't listen."
Tell which person it is (voice print)
Could also be important for monitoring meetings, determining speaker
Primarily identifying words Improving all the time Commercial systems: IBM
ViaVoice, Dragon Dictate, ...
Speaker dependent/independent
Parametric patterns are sensitive to speaker With training (dependent) can get better
Vocabulary Some
have 50,000+ words
Isolated word vs. continuous speech
Did you vs. Didja
Continuous: where words stop & begin Typically a pattern match, no context used
Java Speech SDK
FreeTTS 1.1.1 http://freetts.sourceforge.net/docs/index.php
IBM JavaBeans for speech Visual/Real Basic speech SDK OS capabilities (speech recognition and synthesis built in to OS) (TextEdit) VoiceXML
tool automate
the construction of NLP systems avoid the need for large linguistic knowledge bases
portability move
to new domain quickly reduce the need for expertise in computational linguistics
robustness handle
ungrammatical or unexpected text missing domain knowledge
Statistical methods have transformed the field of NLP Very good performance on increasing numbers/types of problems in NLP Thus far, the most successful statistical and ML algorithms are supervised learning algorithms Require
large amounts of training data that has been annotated with the “correct” answers Corpus annotation bottleneck
Japanese, Chinese, Thai, ...: no spaces between words
Combining simple statistics from unsegmented Japanese newswire yields results rivaling grammar-based approaches.
[Ando & Lee 2000, 2003]
Translating from one language to another is challenging even to human translators. e.g. signs translated into English by a person: Utmost of chicken with smashed pot. (restaurant in Greece) Nervous meatballs (restaurant in Bulgaria) The nuns harbor all diseases and have no respect for religion. (Swiss nunnery hospital) All the water has been passed by the manager. (German hotel)
analysis
input
generation
output
Morphological analysis
Morphological synthesis
Syntactic analysis
Syntactic realization
Semantic Interpretation
Lexical selection
Interlingua
Doesn’t work well enough yet
ACL 2013 8th Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation MT Summit 2013 Machine Translation without the Translation, Chronicle of Higher Education NLPCS 2013: 10th International Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Science Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Automated Reasoning