Human Communication from the Perspective of Natural Language Processing

Natural language processing is one of a number of terms used to refer to a collection of techniques concerned with getting machines to either analyse or generate human language, either in written or spoken form. Traditionally, the model that has underlain much of this work implicitly assumes the appropriateness of Reddy's conduit metaphor: we have something in mind that we want to communicate, we package it up in language, our conversational participant receives this message, and then unpacks it to construct in her own mind some representation that is something like what we started with. More recent work in NLP takes a different slant, being concerned more fundamentally with patterns that can be detected statistically in large volumes of surface text. In this talk, I'll aim to provide something of an overview of how NLP past and present views communication, with the goal of highlighting where there are existing connections with other disciplines in human communication science, and also where there might be new unexplored connections.