Introduction

Introduction

1. What does the book mean by NLP, and what other names does the field go by?
   Natural language processing: getting computers to perform useful tasks involving human language. It is also called computational linguistics, spoken language processing, speech recognition, or most recently simply language modeling.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 1, Introduction, p. 3
2. What was ELIZA, and what lesson about deployment did it already teach?
   A 1966 system by Weizenbaum that used regular-expression substitutions to simulate a Rogerian psychologist. People became deeply emotionally involved with it (even asking Weizenbaum to leave the room while they typed), showing early that emotional engagement and privacy must be considered when deploying language systems.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 1, Introduction, p. 4
3. What three questions should NLP practitioners keep asking themselves about the systems they build?
   “Who am I designing this system or asking this research question for?”, “Should we work on this task, or a different one?”, and “How can I make this system more aligned with human values?”
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 1, Introduction, p. 4