Natural Language Processing Lectures

It is never ceasing to amaze me how many new topics can be presented in the course of a week, let alone a semester.  NLP is rather intriguing and what seems like a rather simple concept of breaking down words, the process is very complex when you need to apply semantic meanings to the words to keep them in context.  Dr. Gonzalez is very enthusiastic on this subject.  The first lecture was not as technical as the second one.  When we started getting into the actual coding and search strings, it was very interesting - but this is what I like to learn.  There's a lot of information presented, almost overwhelming again, similar to ontologies and taxonomies so it would be nice to have a review of the important things to take away from this lecture. 

I  need to learn more about Finite State Automata.  I understand the concept but would like to see more examples.  A link I have found helpful to apply NLP to the clinical field was a study using NLP to identify Heart Failure.  Within the study, they quote their sensitivity, specificity and the predictive value --- they didn't utilize the words recall or precision.  Here's the link:  http://www.informatics-review.com/wiki/index.php/Electronic_Medical_Records_for_Clinical_Research:

I also found  a simple diagram showing the relevancy as it relates to Recall and Precision calculations similar to the sensitivity and specificity.

Here's the link for the diagram:  http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~jerryzhu/cs838/IR.pdf
If anyone else finds some great introductory links, please share them.
Posted by :  Debbie Carter