What is Natural Language?

Natural Language refers to the language that people use for communication in their daily lives. Korean, English, Chinese, Spanish, and so on, which we use in our daily lives, all fall under natural language. Unlike artificially created languages, natural language has naturally evolved and changed over thousands of years. In this article, we will examine the definition, characteristics, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) of natural language.

Natural Language

Definition of Natural Language

Natural language is the language used by humans for communication. It follows specific rules and grammar, enabling communication between people. Natural language can be broadly classified into spoken language (spoken language) and written language (written language).

Characteristics of Natural Language

Complexity: Natural language has a very complex and multi-layered structure. The same word can have various meanings depending on the context, and sentence structures are also very diverse.

Ambiguity: Natural language often involves ambiguity. This means that a single sentence or word can have multiple interpretations. For example, the sentence "I went to the bank" could mean "I went to withdraw money" or "I went to the riverbank".

Flexibility: Natural language has the flexibility to continuously add and change new words and expressions. New terms and slang emerge with technological advancements and social changes.

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Natural Language Processing is a field of technology that enables computers to understand and process human natural language. It is a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and encompasses various tasks such as language understanding, generation, and translation. The main application areas of NLP are as follows.

Machine Translation: Translation services like Google Translate and Papago utilize NLP technology to provide translations between various languages.

Speech Recognition: Speech recognition systems like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa use NLP to understand user speech and provide appropriate responses.

Chatbots: Chatbots used for customer service or information provision leverage NLP to understand user queries and provide answers.

Sentiment Analysis: This technology analyzes text from social media or review sites to determine sentiment. This allows for the analysis of consumer opinions and trends.

Conclusion

Natural language is a complex and flexible language used by humans for communication. Natural Language Processing technology enables computers to understand and process this natural language, leading to its application in various fields. The advancement of NLP technology in the future will make communication between humans and computers more natural and efficient.

I hope this article has helped improve your understanding of natural language and natural language processing. The complexity and appeal of natural language make it a fascinating field that requires ongoing research and development.

What are Constructed Language and Machine Language?

Unlike natural language, constructed language and machine language are languages artificially created for specific purposes.

Constructed Language

Constructed language refers to a language that is intentionally created for a specific purpose. Unlike natural language, it is a language designed and structured with human intervention. Constructed languages come in various types depending on their intended purposes.

Machine Language

Machine language is a language that computers can directly understand and execute. Unlike languages that humans understand, it consists of binary code (0s and 1s). Machine language is very basic and is used to control the operation of computer hardware.