Chapter 19

Introduction to Natural Language

Language is everywhere. It permeates our thoughts mediates our relations with others, and even creeps into our dreams. The overwhelming bulk of human knowledge is stored and transmitted in language. Language is so ubiquitous that we take it for granted but without it, society as we know it would be impossible.

–Ronand Langacker

Language and its Structure (1967)

Anatural language is a language spoken by people, such as English, German, or Tagalog. This is in opposition to artificial languages like Lisp, FORTRAN, or Morse code. Natural language processing is an important part of AI because language is intimately connected to thought. One measure of this is the number of important books that mention language ...

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