Computer Language Understanding

In general, natural language processing involves a translation from the natural language to some internal representation that represents its meaning. The internal representation might be predicate calculus, a semantic network, or a frame representation.

There are many problems in making such a translation:

• Ambiguity: There may be multiple ways of translating a statement.
  • Lexical Ambiguity: most words have multiple meanings.

    
    The pitcher broke his arm.
    
    The pitcher broke.
    

  • Grammatical Ambiguity: Different ways of parsing (assigning structure to) a given sentence.

    
    One morning I shot an elephant
      in my pajamas.
    How he got in my pajamas
      I don't know.