Foundations of Language
Linguistics, morphology, syntax, and language structure.
Ambiguity in Language
Lexical, syntactic, semantic, and referential ambiguity – the core challenge that makes NLP hard, illustrated by why “I saw her duck” has at least five interpretations and how systems learn to resolve them.
Levels of Linguistic Analysis
The hierarchy from phonology to pragmatics – each level adding structure that NLP systems must capture to move from raw sound or text to genuine understanding.
Morphology
How words are built from morphemes – inflection, derivation, and compounding that affect meaning, and whose cross-linguistic variation profoundly shapes tokenization and NLP system design.
Pragmatics and Discourse
Meaning beyond the literal – context, implicature, speech acts, Gricean maxims, and discourse coherence that determine what speakers actually communicate versus what their words technically say.
Semantics
The study of meaning – from word senses to compositional sentence meaning to logical representations, and the distributional hypothesis that reshaped how NLP systems learn what words mean.
Syntax and Grammar
Rules governing sentence structure – phrase structure grammars, dependency relations, constituency trees, and the Chomsky hierarchy that defines the computational complexity of parsing.
Text as Data
Treating language as structured data – corpora, annotation schemes, inter-annotator agreement, and the paradigm shift from hand-crafted features to learned representations that transformed how NLP systems consume text.
What Is NLP
Natural Language Processing is the interdisciplinary field at the intersection of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence that enables machines to understand, generate, and reason about human language.