A goal of natural language understanding is investigating methods to allow the computer to understand enough of a command given to it in a natural language to perform some action. Imprecision Incompleteness Inaccuracy Ambiguity can be overcome by putting an idea in context. Imprecision can be overcome by relating the idea to a familiar situation. Incompleteness can be overcome by completing the idea based on our expectations of likely events. Inaccuracy can be overcome by inferring the intended meaning by recognizing a familiar pattern.
Text generation determines what a computer says and how the computer says it.
Text generation programs construct the text based on a communicative goal. The strategic level is the level where all the planning takes place, i.e., the selection of concepts and their relationship. On the strategic level, the problem solving of the program includes also the planning of utterances with respect to what the informative content of the utterance is and the level of communication with the user of a particular system. On the tactical level, the program has to fine-tune the utterance depending on content, length, and stylistic variations. The task for speech recognition systems is to separate the signals and classify them into groups of sounds that make up individual words.