Introduction to Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is one of the important research directions in the field of artificial intelligence, with its core research focusing on how to process and understand natural language. NLP research integrates multiple disciplines including linguistics, computer science, mathematics, and cognitive psychology. Its research content covers different granularities from characters, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs to documents, and includes multiple dimensions such as processing, understanding, cognition, and generation. The knowledge points involved in the research are numerous and complex.

With the widespread application of natural language processing and the rapid advancement of machine learning algorithms represented by deep learning, natural language processing algorithms and research tasks have been developing rapidly in recent years. Since 2003, the authors have taught natural language processing courses for undergraduates, master students, and doctoral students at the School of Computer Science and Technology, Fudan University. This book summarizes years of teaching and research, aiming to provide readers with a more systematic and comprehensive understanding of natural language processing.

This book is divided into 14 chapters, mainly consisting of three parts: The first part introduces the fundamental technologies of natural language processing, including lexical processing, syntactic analysis, semantic analysis, discourse analysis, and language models. The second part introduces a series of core technologies in natural language processing, including information extraction, machine translation, sentiment analysis, text summarization, and knowledge graphs. The third part discusses the robustness and interpretability issues of machine learning-based natural language processing models.

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