1.
Define Natural Language Processing with examples
NLP is a branch of AI that enables computers to understand, interpret, and generate human
language.
Examples include chatbots, speech recognition, and text summarization.
2. List two major applications of NLP
1. Machine Translation (e.g., Google Translate)
2. Sentiment Analysis (e.g., analyzing product reviews)
3. What is meant by evaluating language understanding systems
It is the process of measuring how accurately a system interprets and processes natural language.
Metrics include precision, recall, and F1-score.
4. Mention the different levels of language analysis
1. Phonology (sound)
2. Morphology (word structure)
3. Syntax (sentence structure)
4. Semantics (meaning)
5. Pragmatics (context)
5. Differentiate between representation and understanding in NLP
Representation is how language knowledge is stored in the system.
Understanding is the system’s ability to interpret meaning from language.
6. What is the organization of a natural language understanding system
It typically includes input processing, parsing, semantic interpretation, and output generation.
Each module processes language at a different level.
7. Give two examples of linguistic applications of NLP
1. Part-of-speech tagging
2. Named Entity Recognition (NER)
8. What is meant by English syntax in linguistic background
English syntax studies the rules for arranging words to form correct sentences.
It includes word order, phrase structure, and grammatical relations.
9. Why is the study of language important for NLP
Understanding language rules helps machines process, analyze, and generate human language
accurately.
It ensures meaningful communication with computers.
10. List any two challenges in natural language understanding
1. Ambiguity (words with multiple meanings)
2. Idiomatic expressions or figurative language
11. Differentiate between top down and bottom up parsers
Top-down parser starts from the start symbol and predicts structure.
Bottom-up parser starts from input tokens and builds structure toward the start symbol.
12. What is a transition network grammar
It is a grammar represented as a network of states and transitions for parsing sentences.
It helps in recognizing sentence structures step by step.
13. Define feature system in the context of NLP
A feature system represents linguistic attributes like number, gender, and tense.
It is used to improve parsing and semantic analysis.
14. What is morphological analysis in NLP
It is the process of analyzing word structure into roots, prefixes, and suffixes.
It helps in understanding the meaning and form of words.
15. What is meant by augmented grammars
Augmented grammars are grammars enhanced with features and constraints.
They provide more precise and context-sensitive parsing.
16. Explain the role of Bayes rule in NLP
Bayes rule is used to calculate probabilities of linguistic hypotheses given observed data.
It is widely used in spam detection and speech recognition.
17. What is Shannon’s game in language modeling
Shannon’s game predicts the next character or word in a sentence based on preceding context.
It demonstrates statistical properties of natural language.
18. Define entropy in the context of language processing
Entropy measures the uncertainty or unpredictability of language data.
Higher entropy means more randomness in text sequences.
19. What is cross entropy in NLP
Cross entropy measures the difference between predicted and actual probability distributions.
It evaluates the performance of language models.
20. Mention one advantage of parsing with features
Features allow parsers to handle agreement, tense, and gender constraints accurately.
21. What are grammars for natural language
Grammars are rules that define valid sentence structures in a language.
They guide syntactic analysis and parsing.
22. Define the movement phenomenon in natural language
Movement refers to words or phrases changing positions in a sentence for emphasis or question
formation.
Example: “What did she eat?” (object moved to sentence start).
23. What is meant by gap threading in parsing
Gap threading tracks displaced elements in a sentence during parsing.
It helps handle questions and relative clauses.
24. Explain human preference in parsing
Humans prefer simpler, less ambiguous sentence structures during comprehension.
Parsing models mimic this by choosing the most probable structure.
25. What is a shift reduce parser
It is a bottom-up parser that shifts input tokens onto a stack and reduces them to grammar rules.
26. What is a deterministic parser
A parser that chooses a single parsing action at each step without backtracking.
It is faster but less flexible than non-deterministic parsers.
27. State one limitation of shift reduce parsers
They cannot handle ambiguous sentences without backtracking.
28. Differentiate between deterministic and non-deterministic parsing
Deterministic parsing makes single-step choices; non-deterministic tries multiple paths.
Deterministic is faster, non-deterministic is more flexible.
29. Mention one real world use of deterministic parsers
Used in compilers to parse programming languages efficiently.
30. What is the purpose of grammar rules in natural language processing
Grammar rules define correct sentence structures and guide parsing algorithms.
31. What is semantic interpretation in NLP
It is the process of assigning meaning to syntactic structures in language.
32. Define word sense disambiguation
It is identifying the correct meaning of a word based on context.
33. What is meant by logical form in NLP
Logical form is a representation of sentence meaning in formal notation.
34. What are thematic roles in semantic analysis
Roles describe the relationship between sentence elements and actions.
Example: Agent, Patient, Instrument.
35. Define speech acts with example
Speech acts are actions performed through language, like requesting or apologizing.
Example: “Please open the door” is a request.
36. What is an n-gram model in language modeling
An n-gram model predicts the next word based on the previous n−1 words.
Example: Bigram uses one previous word, trigram uses two.
37. List two parameters used for evaluating language models
1. Perplexity
2. Accuracy
38. What is parameter estimation in language modeling
It is the process of determining probabilities of words or sequences from data.
39. Mention one advantage of multilingual language models
They can process multiple languages using a single model, saving time and resources.
40. What is cross-lingual language modeling
Training a model in one language and applying it to understand or generate another language.
41. Define machine translation
Machine translation automatically converts text or speech from one language to another.
42. List two major problems of machine translation
1. Ambiguity in words and sentences
2. Structural differences between languages
43. What is meant by Anusaraka in NLP
Anusaraka is a machine-assisted translation system for Indian languages.
44. What is the structure of the Anusaraka system
It includes analysis, transfer, and generation modules for language translation.
45. What is a language bridge in Anusaraka
A system that connects two languages by mapping words and structures between them.
46. Define multilingual information retrieval
Searching and retrieving information in multiple languages from a database or web.
47. What is monolingual information retrieval
Searching for information in a single language.
48. What is cross-language information retrieval (CLIR)
Retrieving information in one language using queries in another language.
49. What is multilingual automatic summarization
Automatically generating summaries of texts in multiple languages.
50. Mention any two resources used in multilingual information retrieval
1. Bilingual dictionaries
2. Parallel corpora