Putting Natural in Natural Language Processing

Understand

Human language is firstly spoken and only secondarily written.

• Text, however, is a very convenient and efficient representation of language, and modern civilization has made it ubiquitous.
• Thus the field of NLP has overwhelmingly focused on processing written rather than spoken language.
• Work on spoken language, on the other hand, has been siloed off within the largely separate speech processing community which has been inordinately preoccupied with transcribing speech into text.