இயற்கை மொழி செயலாக்கம்: Natural Language Processing

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence plays a significant role in today's scientific and technological development. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is one of the important branches of Artificial Intelligence. The fundamental objective of NLP is to enable computers to understand, analyse, interpret, and respond appropriately to human languages such as Tamil and English. NLP simplifies human–computer interaction and has applications in various fields, including machine translation, text-to-speech conversion, speech-to-text conversion, sentiment analysis, question-answering systems, information retrieval, and text summarisation.
Natural Language Processing offers new opportunities for languages with rich literary traditions, such as Tamil. However, the unique characteristics of the Tamil language, including its script, word structure, grammatical system, inflectional morphology, semantic variations, and dialectal differences, present several challenges in NLP research and development. These linguistic features require specialised computational approaches and language-specific resources to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of language-processing systems.
This paper examines the origin and development of Natural Language Processing, its fundamental components, major applications, and current status in Tamil language technology. It also discusses the challenges involved in processing Tamil through computational methods and explores future opportunities for developing effective NLP tools and applications for Tamil. The study highlights the importance of integrating linguistic knowledge with modern computational techniques to preserve, promote, and expand the use of the Tamil language in the digital era.

Keywords

• Natural Language Processing
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computational Linguistics
• Machine Translation
• Tamil Language
• Text Analysis
• Language Technology.