Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science

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Natural Language Processing

What is natural language processing (NLP)? 

Natural language processing refers to ways that computers interpret and reproduce the ways that humans naturally speak and write. When we study NLP, we look at the how computers misinterpret vs. correctly interpret ambiguity, how they interact with sociolinguistic differences in speech, and how we can improve machine interpretation to reduce biases and make natural language processing more equitable. 

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PortNLP 

We explore new ways to advance language technologies -- from understanding complex texts to generating multilingual summaries. We aim to design systems that are effective, efficient, fair, and human-centered. We envision a future where language technologies are trustworthy and useful in everyday life.

PortNLP website

Maseeh Engineers Explain: Natural Language Processing

Ameeta Agrawal, Computer Science Assistant Professor: Natural Language Processing is the subfield of AI that focuses on teaching computers how to understand, generate, interpret, reason with human-like language. 

Why is this important? Well, if you think about it, humans have this natural tendency to communicate using language. And so if we want to build more useful computer AI systems, language just provides that natural mechanism. 

Language also has always been the mechanism through which we have encoded our knowledge, be it in texts or books. And so if we can make that text available to models, they can learn as much knowledge about humans and then build from there. 

It is a very fast evolving field. Just within my own area of research: Think about question-answering systems. Thing about text summarization systems. Think about machine translation and many such applications that are driving real-world adoption of AI. 

Let knowledge serve. Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science at Portland State University. pdx.edu/maseeh.