Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing: Behavioral ... - Arteimi.info

skills of the readers. While talking of the linguistics, we would often use the
words ‘syntax’ and ‘semantics’, where the former implies the grammar
involved and the latter corresponds to the association of the words in a
sentence for its understanding. The act of understanding a sentence in a
natural language thus requires background knowledge of the syntax of the
language and the concept on the subject. For instance, a sentence: ‘A cow ate
a tiger’ is syntactically correct but semantically wrong. A child having no
perception about a cow and a tiger cannot determine the semantic weakness of
this sentence. Forming perception of the world comprising of animals like
cows and tigers, therefore, should precede the act of understanding the
sentence.
This chapter covers in detail the principles of representing syntax and
semantics of natural languages by specialized data structures and
computational tools. For the purpose of illustrating the concepts, we take a
fragment of the English language as the domain of our case study. Besides
syntax and semantics, a natural language requires the following types of
analysis for its comprehension. These are i) prosody, ii) phonology, iii)
morphology, iv) pragmatics and v) world knowledge. An overview to these
types of analysis is outlined below.
Prosody: It deals with the rhythm and intonation of a language. Rhythm is
often used in the babbling of infants and children’s wordplay. In religious
ceremony and poetic competition, the importance of rhythm is felt.
Unfortunately this type of analysis is difficult and is thus ignored in most
natural language understanding programs.
Phonology: It examines the sounds of the words that are combined to form
sentences in a language.
Morphology: A ‘morphene’ is the smallest component of words. Morphology
deals with the rules that allow adding prefix and suffix to already known
words. Morphological analysis is useful for identifying the role of a word in a
sentence including tenses, number and part of speech.
Pragmatics: It describes the study of the ways by which the language is
expressed. It also considers the effect of words on the listener. As an example,
if someone asks “What is your date of birth?”, one should answer a date and
this is expected.
World Knowledge: The world knowledge stands for the domain knowledge
of the environment, without which the semantic understanding of the
sentences is difficult.
The types of analysis mentioned above do not have clear-cut
boundaries. In fact, this partition is artificial with a motivation to represent the