Is natural language an inconvenience or an opportunity for IR?
Kimmo Koskenniemi · 2002
Natural language (NL) has evolved to facilitate human communication. It enables the speaker to make the listener's mind wander among her experiences and mental associations roughly according to the intentions of the speaker. The speaker and the listener usually share experiences and expectations, and they use mostly the same units and rules of a shared NL. Written language functions similarly, but in a less interactive way, with fewer possibilities for feedback.Both the symbols of NL (i.e. words or morphemes), and their arrangements are meaningful. Not with universal and precise meanings, but similar enough among different speakers and accurate enough for the communication mostly to succeed.NLs are mostly very large systems. Hundreds of thousands of words and infinitely many possible utterances. Even inflection alone might produce huge numbers of forms, e.g. more than ten thousand distinct forms out of every Finnish verb entry.NL processing (for IR or any other purpose) must cope with phenomena like (1) inflection and compounding, (2) synonymy, (3) polysemy, (4) ambiguity, (5) anaphora and (6) head-modifier relations among words and phrases.Language technology can neutralize much of the effect of these 'inconveniences' inherent with NL, but what kinds of advantages could NL have?