Natural Language Processing · TEE · papers
Q2A · NLP tasks and syntax versus semantics
Solved re-exam · February 2026
Actual re-examination · 9 February 2026 · 100 marks · 3 hours
Question. i. Discuss five different tasks associated with Natural Language Processing.
ii. Compare and contrast syntactic analysis and semantic analysis in NLP. Support your explanation with examples. [10 marks]
ii. Compare and contrast syntactic analysis and semantic analysis in NLP. Support your explanation with examples. [10 marks]
Answer
i. Five NLP tasks
| Task | What it does | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Machine translation | Expresses source-language content in a target language | English “Good morning” → Hindi greeting |
| Sentiment analysis | Identifies the opinion or attitude expressed | “The service was excellent” → positive sentiment |
| Named Entity Recognition | Finds and types entity spans | “Asha joined Google” → PERSON and ORGANIZATION |
| Question answering | Returns an answer supported by a question’s relevant information | From a passage, identify who discovered a described result |
| Text classification | Assigns predefined category labels | Classify an email as spam or legitimate |
ii. Syntactic and semantic analysis
| Basis | Syntactic analysis | Semantic analysis |
|---|---|---|
| Main question | How are words grammatically organised? | What do the words and sentence mean? |
| Typical output | POS tags, constituency or dependency structure | Word senses, semantic relations or a meaning representation |
| Knowledge used | Grammar rules and structural patterns | Lexical meaning, context and semantic constraints |
| Example | Identify “The boy” as subject NP and “ate an apple” as VP | Interpret the boy as eater and apple as the thing eaten |
“Colourless green ideas sleep furiously” can have a plausible English grammatical structure while remaining semantically unusual. Syntax alone therefore does not guarantee ordinary meaning. Conversely, “boy eat apple yesterday” conveys a possible event despite grammatical errors.
The analyses support each other. In “I saw the man with a telescope,” syntactic PP attachment determines which meaning is available, and semantic knowledge can help choose a plausible attachment. A full NLP system often needs both.
Yaad rakho: Syntax = sentence ka structure; semantics = us structure ka meaning.