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CS405: Artificial Intelligence

Unit 7: Natural Language Understanding
This unit will provide you with a basic introduction to Natural Language Understanding (NLU) in AI. Syntax, semantics, and ambiguity of natural language are discussed. Simple examples are presented. Some of what we have seen, in search and in learning, is applied in NLU. Natural language processing and understanding is a large field of research and has entire courses devoted to it. So, in this introduction, our objective is simply to introduce the problems and approaches.

Completing this unit should take you approximately 20 hours.
- Unit 7 Learning Outcomes Page
- 7.1: Language Overview and Basics
  - Mark Watson's "Practical Artificial Intelligence Programming with Java" URL
    Read Chapters 9 and 10. Chapter 9 gives practical examples of NLP from a programming perspective. Chapter 10 provides additional discussion on extracting semantic information from text and databases.
- 7.2: Syntax and Semantics
  - Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Leslie Kaelbling and Tomás Lozano-Pérez's "Language Understanding I" URL
    Read these slides.
  - Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Leslie Kaelbling and Tomás Lozano-Pérez's "Language Understanding II" URL
    Read these slides.