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Stemming is not meaningfully a natural language processing technique, any more than arithmetic is a technique of linear equations.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
Is it not the processing of natural language?
- JohnHaugeland 5y ago
  Would you call addition a system of linear equations? No, you don't use the college senior label for the highschool freshman topic. You use the smallest label that fits. It's string processing. NLP is actually understanding the language. Stemming is simple string matching. Playing the technicality game to stretch fields to encompass everything you think even marginally related isn't being thorough or inclusive; it's being bloated, and losing track of the meaning of the term. Splitting on spaces also isn't NLP.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    Stemming is a task specific to a natural language. You can't run an English stemmer on French and get good results, for example. All NLP is, strictly speaking, more or less elaborate string matching. > Splitting on spaces also isn't NLP. String splitting can be, but it's a bit borderline. I'll argue you're in NLP territory if it doesn't split "That FBI guy i.e. J. Edgar Hoover." into four "sentences".
  - necovek 5y ago
    > NLP is actually understanding the language. That's actually not an accepted terminology. There's, indeed, this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-language_understanding Not sure why are you so adamant that yours is the "true meaning", when NLP existed long before machine learning and AI were used for it. And even if not, every term can be defined differently, so it should be normal to have different institutions/people define NLP differently.
necovek 5y ago
At the very least, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing seems to disagree. (So do I: NLP does not have to be machine learning/AI based)

marginalia_nu 5y ago

Is it not the processing of natural language?

JohnHaugeland 5y ago
Would you call addition a system of linear equations? No, you don't use the college senior label for the highschool freshman topic. You use the smallest label that fits. It's string processing. NLP is actually understanding the language. Stemming is simple string matching. Playing the technicality game to stretch fields to encompass everything you think even marginally related isn't being thorough or inclusive; it's being bloated, and losing track of the meaning of the term. Splitting on spaces also isn't NLP.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  Stemming is a task specific to a natural language. You can't run an English stemmer on French and get good results, for example. All NLP is, strictly speaking, more or less elaborate string matching. > Splitting on spaces also isn't NLP. String splitting can be, but it's a bit borderline. I'll argue you're in NLP territory if it doesn't split "That FBI guy i.e. J. Edgar Hoover." into four "sentences".
- necovek 5y ago
  > NLP is actually understanding the language. That's actually not an accepted terminology. There's, indeed, this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-language_understanding Not sure why are you so adamant that yours is the "true meaning", when NLP existed long before machine learning and AI were used for it. And even if not, every term can be defined differently, so it should be normal to have different institutions/people define NLP differently.

necovek 5y ago

At the very least, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing seems to disagree. (So do I: NLP does not have to be machine learning/AI based)