Levels of Language Processing in NLP
1. Morphological Analysis
Definition: Deals with breaking down words into morphemes (smallest units of meaning).
Purpose: Helps understand word structure and formation.
Example: 'unbelievable' = un- (prefix) + believe (root) + -able (suffix).
Application: Used in stemming, lemmatization, and spell checking.
2. Syntactic Analysis
Definition: Also called parsing; checks grammar and structure of sentences.
Purpose: Identifies how words form phrases and how phrases relate.
Example: 'The dog chased the cat.' S NP (The dog) + VP (chased the cat).
Application: Used in machine translation, question answering, and syntax checkers.
3. Semantic Analysis
Definition: Focuses on word and sentence meanings (literal sense).
Purpose: Resolves ambiguity, assigns word meanings.
Example: 'bank' river bank vs financial bank depending on sentence.
Application: Used in information retrieval, chatbots, word sense disambiguation.
4. Discourse Integration
Definition: Considers the meaning of a sentence in context of previous ones.
Purpose: Handles references and coherence across sentences.
Example: 'Ravi went to the store. He bought a book.' 'He' refers to 'Ravi'.
Application: Used in co-reference resolution, story summarization, dialogue systems.
5. Pragmatic Analysis
Definition: Interprets speakers actual intent using context and world knowledge.
Purpose: Infers implied meanings beyond literal content.
Example: 'Can you pass the salt?' is a polite request, not a literal question.
Application: Used in virtual assistants, context-aware systems, and speech act recognition.