What is the difference between an expert system and natural language processing?

Answer 1

Answer 1.

An expert system is designed to emulate the abilities and thought processes of a human expert. It is designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through knowledge rather than by following the procedure of a developer, like other computer programs.

Natural language processing is an entire field of computer science, not just a type of program. This field is concerned with the interactions between human languages and computers. Much of the innovation in this field of human-computer interaction is concerned with natural language understanding, or enabling computers to get meaning from human or natural language inputs.

Answer 2.

An expert system works on the basis of predefined rules of knowledge for inference. However, this knowledge may be quite constrained for a narrow domain case. In order, to process through a set of rules an expert system uses a form of chaining which could arise as either forward or backward mode. It may even utilize such optimized approaches as the RETE algorithm which is a type of forward chaining used in business processes. You may even extend an expert system using fuzzy logic to increase the reasoning ability from a bounds criteria of just 0 and 1 to the entire domain of approximations. In comparison, a natural language extends the idea of rules induction and specifies formalisms and algorithms towards understanding language semantics, syntax, lexical variations, pragmatics, and discourse within any given context of a domain. The idea is linked to the Turing Test which is nowadays considered to be a bit outdated in concept and needs to be reevaluated. Natural Languages Processing can involve deep and shallow parsing using not just rules but even probablistic machine learning algorithms. As result from Artificial Intelligence standpoint, natural language processing applications are more sophisticated and focused around computational linguistics of language and speech process engineering for a particular domain case. However, expert systems can be applied in wide case of applications but are less sophisticated as their understanding of knowledge is fairly rigid to a set of predefined if-then rules.