One of the challenges inherent in natural language processing is teaching computers to understand the way humans learn and use language. Take, for example, the sentence “Baby swallows fly.” This simple sentence has multiple meanings, depending on whether the word “swallows” or the word “fly” is used as the verb, which also determines whether “baby” is used as a noun or an adjective. In the course of human communication, the meaning of the sentence depends on both the context in which it was communicated and each person’s understanding of the ambiguity in human languages. This sentence poses problems for software that must first be programmed to understand context and linguistic structures.

NLP is also referred to as computational linguistics.

Natural Language Processing and AI: Research Groups
A list of international research groups involved in NLP and AI.

NLP Dictionary
An online dictionary of words and phrases related to the field of natural language processing.

NLP Links
Yahoo!’s directory of links on natural language processing.