Please note : This is just only a reference material .

Please read the prescribed books in the

syllabus and any other resources for knowledge enhancement in this subject.( NLP )

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is a natural language processing (NLP) technique that

automatically determines the emotional tone of a piece of text to determine if

it's positive, negative, or neutral. It's also known as opinion mining or emotion

artificial intelligence.

For e.g.

Positive sentiment : I love pizza.

Negative sentiment : Pizza was very bad.

Neutral sentiment : I ordered the pizza today.

Sentiment analysis is a subcategory of NLP, which is a field that gives

computers the ability to understand human language. It uses machine

learning to analyze text data, which involves algorithms that learn from

training data.
Sentiment analysis is a useful tool for businesses to understand their

customers and make data-driven decisions. It can help organizations:

Understand customer opinions and experience, Improve brand reputation,

Understand worker attitudes, Make informed marketing strategies, and Stay

up to date on market trends.

Sentiment analysis can be applied to a variety of online sources, including:

● Surveys
● News articles
● Tweets
● Blog posts
● Customer support chat transcripts
● Social media comments
● Reviews

The steps for performing sentiment analysis using natural language

processing (NLP) are:

● Data collection: Gather data from multiple sources

● Text preprocessing: Clean and prepare the data for analysis. This includes
tokenization, stemming, lemmatization, stop-word removal, and part-of-speech
tagging.
● Feature extraction: Extract valuable information from the text data. This helps to
encapsulate the most essential features of the text.
 ● Model training and optimization: Train and optimize the sentiment analysis
model.
● Model evaluation: Assess the performance of the model using relevant metrics.
This involves generating predictions using the trained model on a test dataset,
and then creating a classification report.

Sentiment analysis is a major NLP task that involves extracting the feeling

from a given text and determining whether it is positive, negative, or neutral.

Difference between Jacard and Cosine Similarity :

● Jaccard similarity is primarily used for sets or binary data. It compares the
presence or absence of elements between two sets.
● Cosine similarity is commonly used for vector representations, particularly in
text analysis or document comparisons.

● Jaccard similarity is calculated by dividing the size of the intersection of two

sets by the size of their union. It ranges from 0 (no common elements) to 1
(identical sets).
● Cosine similarity is calculated by taking the dot product of two vectors and
dividing it by the product of their magnitudes. It ranges from -1 (opposite
directions) to 1 (identical directions), with 0 indicating orthogonality.

● Jaccard similarity is commonly used in applications involving set

comparison, document similarity, collaborative filtering, social network
analysis, and data deduplication.
● Cosine similarity is widely used in text analysis, document comparisons,
information retrieval, recommendation systems, and dimensionality
reduction tasks. It is particularly useful when capturing semantic or
contextual similarity in textual data.
Another example of Jacard

Jaccard similarity is a measure of how two sets (of n-grams in your case) are similar.

Let us take example of how to find Jacard similarity between two strings by using char
bigram model

For example if you have 2 strings “abcde” and “abdcde” it works as follow :

J(A, B) = (A∩B) / (A∪B)

J(A, B) = (3 / 6) = 0.5

There is also the Jaccard distance which captures the dissimilarity between two sets, and
is calculated by taking one minus the Jaccard coefficient (in this case, 1 - 0.5 = 0.5)

Jaccard Distance = 1 - Jaccard Coefficient

Language : Language is a structured system of communication that consists of

grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning,

both in spoken and signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing.

CFG ( Context Free Grammar )

In natural language processing, a context-free grammar (CFG) is a

set of production rules used to generate all the possible sentences in

a given language. A CFG is a formal grammar in the sense that it

consists of a set of terminals, which are the basic units of the

language, and a set of non-terminals, which are used to generate the

terminals through a set of production rules. CFGs are often used in

natural language parsing and generation. They are also used in

natural language understanding, where a CFG can be used to

analyze the syntactic structure of a sentence.

G = ⟨T,N,S,R⟩

● T is set of terminals (lexicon)

● N is set of non-terminals

● S is start symbol ( one of the non terminals )

● R is rules/productions of the form X → γ,

where X is a nonterminal and γ is a sequence

of terminals and nonterminals (may be

empty).

● A grammar G generates a language L.

An example context-free grammar
Parsing

In natural language processing, parsing is the process of analyzing a

sentence to determine its grammatical structure, and there are two

main approaches to parsing: top-down parsing and bottom-up

parsing.

What is Parser ?

A parser is a software component that takes input data (typically text) and builds

a data structure – often some kind of parse tree, abstract syntax tree or other

hierarchical structure, giving a structural representation of the input while

checking for correct syntax. Parser also requires CFG for generating parse tree.

A parser in NLP uses the grammar rules to verify if the input text

is valid or not syntactically. The parser helps us to get the

meaning of the provided text. As the parser helps us to analyze

the syntax error in the text; so, the parsing process is also

known as the syntax analysis or the Syntactic analysis.

Top-down parsing is a parsing technique that starts with the

highest level of a grammar’s production rules, and then works its

way down to the lowest level. It begins with the start symbol of

the grammar and applies the production rules recursively to

expand it into a parse tree.

Bottom-up parsing is a parsing technique that starts with the

sentence’s words and works its way up to the highest level of the

grammar’s production rules. It begins with the input sentence

and applies the production rules in reverse, reducing the input

sentence to the start symbol of the grammar.

Example of Top Down Parsing ( Parse Tree )
Word2Vec
Word2Vec creates a representation of each word present in our

vocabulary into a vector. Words used in similar contexts or having

semantic relationships are captured effectively through their closeness

in the vector space- effectively speaking similar words will have similar

word vectors! History. Word2vec was created, patented, and published

in 2013 by a team of researchers led by Tomas Mikolov at Google.

Let us consider a classic example: “king”, “queen”, “man”, “girl”,

“prince”

Hypothetical features to understand word embeddings

In a hypothetical world, vectors could then define the weight of each

criteria (for example royalty, masculinity, femininity, age etc.) for each

of the given words in our vocabulary.

What we then observe is:

● As expected, “king”, “queen”, “prince” have similar scores for

“royalty” and “girl”, “queen” have similar scores for

“femininity”.

● An operation that removes “man” from “king”, would yield in

a vector very close to “queen” ( “king”- “man” = “queen”)

● Vectors “king” and “prince” have the same characteristics,

except for age, telling us how they might possibly be

semantically related to each other.

Word2Vec forms word embeddings that work in a similar fashion

except for the fact that the criterion we have used for each of the words

are not clearly determinable. What matters to us is the semantic and

syntactic relations between words which can still be determined by our

model without explicitly having defining features for units of the

vector.

Word2Vec has also shown to identify relations like country-capital

over larger datasets showing us how powerful word embeddings can

be.

Model Architecture

Word2Vec essentially is a shallow 2-layer neural network trained.

● The input contains all the documents/texts in our training

set. For the network to process these texts, they are

represented in a 1-hot encoding of the words.

● The number of neurons present in the hidden layer is equal to

the length of the embedding we want. That is, if we want all

 our words to be vectors of length 300, then the hidden layer

will contain 300 neurons.

● The output layer contains probabilities for a target word (given

an input to the model, what word is expected) given a particular

input.

● At the end of the training process, the hidden weights are treated

as the word embedding. Intuitively, this can be thought of as

each word having a set of n weights (300 considering the

example above) “weighing” their different characteristics (an

analogy we used earlier).

There are two ways in which we can develop these embeddings:

1. Continuous Bag-Of-Words (CBOW) : CBOW predicts

the target-word based on its surrounding words. The input

layer contains the context words and the output layer contains the
 current word. The hidden layer contains the dimensions we want to

represent the current word present at the output layer.

For example, consider the sentence, “The cake was chocolate

flavoured”.

The model will then iterate over this sentence for different target

words, such as:

“The ____ was chocolate flavoured” being inputs and “cake” being the

target word.
 2. Skipgram

Skipgram works in the exact opposite way to CBOW. Here, we take an

input word and expect the model to tell us what words it is expected to

be surrounded by. The input layer contains the current word and the output

layer contains the context words. The hidden layer contains the number of

dimensions in which we want to represent current word present at the input

layer.

Taking the same example, with “cake” we would expect the model to

give us “The”, “was”, “chocolate”, “flavoured” for the given instance.

 Difference between Bag of Words and Word2Vec

Bag of words (BoW) and Word2Vec are both natural language processing
(NLP) techniques that use embeddings to represent text data, but they differ
in how they process text:

​ Bag of words
​ A statistical model that counts the number of times each word appears in a document
and represents the text as a fixed-length vector. BoW disregards word order and
syntax, and only considers whether a word appears in a document, not where.
​
​ Word2Vec
​ A two-layer neural network that processes text by converting words into vectors that
represent their meaning, semantic similarity, and relationship to other words.
 Word2Vec takes in batches of raw text data and outputs a vector space where each
word is assigned a corresponding vector.

Here are some other differences between BoW and Word2Vec:

​
​ Implementation
​ BoW can be implemented as a Python dictionary, while Word2Vec uses a dense
neural network.
​
​
​ Limitations
​ BoW has several limitations, including not understanding word order, context, or
meaning, and always representing text in the same way.
​
​
​ Applications
​ BoW is used in information retrieval, while Word2Vec can help computers learn the
context of expressions and keywords from large text collections.
Understanding Linguistic :
Linguistics is the study of language, its structure, and the rules that govern its structure.
Linguists, specialists in linguistics, have traditionally analyzed language in terms of
several subfields of study. Speech-language pathologists study these subfields of
language and are specially trained to assess and treat language and its subfields.
These include morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics and phonology.

Morphology

Morphology is the study of word structure. It describes how words are formed out of
more basic elements of language called morphemes. A morpheme is the smallest
unit of a language. Morphemes are considered minimal because if they were subdivided
any further, they would become meaningless. Each morpheme is different from the
others because each singles a distinct meaning. Morphemes are used to form words.
Base, root or free morphemes are words that have meaning, cannot be broken-down
into smaller parts, and can have other morphemes added to them. Examples of free
morphemes are ocean, establish, book, color, connect, and hinge. These words mean
something, can stand by themselves, and cannot be broken down into smaller units.
These words can also have other morphemes added to them.

Bound or grammatical morphemes, which cannot convey meaning by themselves, must

be joined with free morphemes in order to have meaning. In the following examples, the
free morphemes are underlined; the bound morphemes are in capital letters:
establishMENT, bookED, colorFUL, DISconnect. Common bound or grammatical
morphemes include the following: -ing (the present progressive), -s (the regular plural;
e.g., cats), -s (the possessive inflection; e.g., man’s), and –ed (the regular past tense;
e.g., washed). Morphemes are a means of modifying word structures to change
meaning. The morphology of a given language describes the rules of such
modifications.

Syntax :

Syntax and morphology are concerned with two major categories of language structure.
Morphology is the study of word structure. Syntax is the study of sentence structure.
The basic meaning of the word syntax is “to join,” “to put together.” In the study of
language, syntax involves the following:

1. The arrangement of words to form meaningful sentences

2. The word order and overall structure of a sentence

A collection of rules that specify the ways and order in which words may be combined to
form sentences in a particular language. As they mature in syntactic development,
children begin to use compound and complex sentences, which can be defined as
follows:

1. Compound sentence: two or more independent clauses joined by a common and

a conjunction or by a semicolon. There are no subordinate clauses in a
compounded sentence. A clause contains a subject and a predicate. An
independent or main clause has a subject and a predicate and can stand alone
(e.g., “The policeman held up the sign, and the cars stopped.”)
2. Complex sentence: contains one independent clause and one or more
dependent or subordinate clauses. A dependent or subordinate clause has a
subject and predicate but cannot stand alone. (e.g., “I will drive my car to Reno if
I have enough gas.”)
Syntax rules differ by language. Speakers of a language do not produce structures with
random and meaningless word order. If they do, speech and language therapy may be
warranted. For example, an English speaker could say, “He said he was going to come
but didn’t.” Due to syntactic rules, a speaker could not say, “He’s going to was said he
didn’t but come.” Languages have different syntactic structures. In English, the basic
syntactic structure is subject + verb + object. This structure, usually called the “kernel
sentence”, can also be called the phrase structure or base structure.

Semantic analysis

Semantic analysis is a crucial component of natural language processing

(NLP) that concentrates on understanding the meaning, interpretation, and
relationships between words, phrases, and sentences

It is a crucial component of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the

inspiration for applications like chatbots, search engines, and text analysis
tools using machine learning.

Tools based on semantic analysis can assist businesses in automatically

extracting useful information from unstructured data, including emails, support
requests, and consumer comments.

Advantages of Semantic Analysis

Semantic analysis offers several advantages across various fields and
applications:

Improved Understanding of Text:

It helps understand the true meaning of words, phrases, and sentences,

leading to a more accurate interpretation of text.
Enhanced Search and Information Retrieval:

Search engines can provide more relevant results by understanding user

queries better, considering the context and meaning rather than just
keywords.

Better Natural Language Processing (NLP):

Semantic analysis forms the backbone of many NLP tasks, enabling

machines to understand and process language more effectively, leading to
improved machine translation, sentiment analysis, etc.

Improved Machine Learning Models:

In AI and machine learning, semantic analysis helps in feature extraction,

sentiment analysis, and understanding relationships in data, which enhances
the performance of models.

Enhanced User Experience:

Chatbots, virtual assistants, and recommendation systems benefit from

semantic analysis by providing more accurate and context-aware responses,
thus significantly improving user satisfaction.

Personalization and Recommendation Systems:

Semantic analysis allows for a deeper understanding of user preferences,

enabling personalized recommendations in e-commerce, content curation,
and more.

Where does Semantic Analysis Work?

Semantic analysis finds applications in various fields, including:
Natural Language Processing (NLP):

It’s used extensively in NLP tasks like sentiment analysis, document

summarization, machine translation, and question answering, thus
showcasing its versatility and fundamental role in processing language.

Search Engines:
Semantic analysis aids search engines in comprehending user queries more
effectively, consequently retrieving more relevant results by considering the
meaning of words, phrases, and context.

Information Retrieval:

In libraries or databases, it helps retrieve documents based on their semantic

relevance rather than just keyword matching.

Chatbots and Virtual Assistants:

Semantic analysis enables these systems to comprehend user queries,

leading to more accurate responses and better conversational experiences.

Machine Learning and AI:

It recreates a crucial role in enhancing the understanding of data for machine

learning models, thereby making them capable of reasoning and
understanding context more effectively.

Customer Service and Support:

Semantic analysis aids in analyzing and understanding customer queries,

helping to provide more accurate and efficient support.
Pragmatic Analysis

Pragmatics in NLP is the study of contextual meaning. It examines cases where a

person’s statement has one literal and another more profound meaning. It tells us how
different contexts can change the meaning of a sentence. It is a subfield of linguistics
that deals with interpreting utterances in communication. Pragmatics considers the
intentions of the speaker and writer. Additional information is also considered to form
the context.

There are many aspects of language that require knowledge derived from pragmatic
analysis. It helps us understand whether the sentence “Give me a glass of water” is an
order or a request. We cannot say this unless we have some context.
Thus pragmatics in NLP helps the computer to understand the real meaning of the
sentences in certain situations. Pragmatics is also concerned with the roles the speaker
and the listener play in creating sense.

For example, if in a school the teacher asks the student coming late in the class as
“What time do you call this?!” It does not mean “the teacher is asking her for the time”.
This is the semantic meaning of the sentence. Here it is referred to as “Why are you so
late?” which is the pragmatic meaning of the sentence.

Importance of Pragmatics in NLP

The concept of pragmatics holds excellent importance for Natural Language

Processing(NLP). It makes machines understand spoken and written language better.
Pragmatics in NLP analyzes the context and helps machines understand how it
changes the meaning of utterances. NLP systems have been facing problems in their
regard for a long time.
Through a few examples, let’s try to understand what would happen if pragmatics didn’t
exist.
Example 1
‘Can you pull the car over?’

● Actual Meaning: Are you capable of pulling(literally pulling) the car?

● Pragmatic Meaning: This means ‘Can you stop the car’ .

Example 2
“Wow, that’s just what I needed.”

● Actual Meaning: This may mean that someone was looking for something,
and they found it. The sentence gives a positive sentiment here.

● Pragmatic Meaning: This could express sarcasm and negative sentiment in

a specific situation.

Example 3

An example of pragmatic meaning is: “It's hot in here! Can you crack a window?"

Here we can infer that the speaker wants the window to be opened a little and does not
want the window to be physically damaged.

Look at the situation/context to understand the actual meaning of the sentence spoken.
If you were told to “crack the window” and the room was a little stuffy. The speaker had
just said before that they were feeling hot. We would know that the speaker wants you
to “open the window” and not literally crack it.
Tokenization

Tokenization in natural language processing (NLP) is a technique that

involves dividing a sentence or phrase into smaller units known as tokens.

These tokens can encompass words, dates, punctuation marks, or even

fragments of words.

What is Tokenization in NLP?

Tokenization is the process of dividing a text into smaller units known as

tokens. Tokens are typically words or sub-words in the context of natural

language processing. Tokenization is a critical step in many NLP tasks,

including text processing, language modelling, and machine translation. The

process involves splitting a string, or text into a list of tokens. One can think

of tokens as parts like a word is a token in a sentence, and a sentence is a

token in a paragraph.

Tokenization involves using a tokenizer to segment unstructured data and

natural language text into distinct chunks of information, treating them as

different elements. The tokens within a document can be used as vector,

transforming an unstructured text document into a numerical data structure

suitable for machine learning. This rapid conversion enables the immediate

utilization of these tokenized elements by a computer to initiate practical

actions and responses. Alternatively, they may serve as features within a

machine learning pipeline, prompting more sophisticated decision-making

processes or behaviors.

Types of Tokenization

Tokenization can be classified into several types based on how the text is

segmented. Here are some types of tokenization:

Word Tokenization:

Word tokenization divides the text into individual words. Many NLP tasks use

this approach, in which words are treated as the basic units of meaning.

Example:

Input: "Tokenization is an important NLP task."

Output: ["Tokenization", "is", "an", "important", "NLP", "task",

"."]

Sentence Tokenization:

The text is segmented into sentences during sentence tokenization. This is

useful for tasks requiring individual sentence analysis or processing.

Example:
Input: "Tokenization is an important NLP task. It helps break down
text into smaller units."

Output: ["Tokenization is an important NLP task.", "It helps break

down text into smaller units."]

Character Tokenization:

This process divides the text into individual characters. This can be useful for

modelling character-level language.

Example:

Input: "Tokenization"

Output: ["T", "o", "k", "e", "n", "i", "z", "a", "t", "i", "o",
"n"]

Need of Tokenization

Tokenization is a crucial step in text processing and natural language

processing (NLP) for several reasons.

● Effective Text Processing: Tokenization reduces the size of raw text

so that it can be handled more easily for processing and analysis.

● Feature extraction: Text data can be represented numerically for

algorithmic comprehension by using tokens as features in machine

learning models.
● Language Modelling: Tokenization in NLP facilitates the creation of

organized representations of language, which is useful for tasks like

text generation and language modelling.

● Information Retrieval: Tokenization is essential for indexing and

searching in systems that store and retrieve information efficiently

based on words or phrases.

● Text Analysis: Tokenization is used in many NLP tasks, including

sentiment analysis and named entity recognition, to determine the

function and context of individual words in a sentence.

● Vocabulary Management: By generating a list of distinct tokens

that stand in for words in the dataset, tokenization helps manage a

corpus’s vocabulary.

● Task-Specific Adaptation: Tokenization can be customized to meet

the needs of particular NLP tasks, meaning that it will work best in

applications such as summarization and machine translation.

● Preprocessing Step: This essential preprocessing step transforms

unprocessed text into a format appropriate for additional statistical

and computational analysis.

Stemming
Stemming is a linguistic normalization process in natural language processing and

information retrieval. Its primary goal is to reduce words to their base or root form,

known as the stem. Stemming helps group words with similar meanings or roots

together, even if they have different inflections, prefixes, or suffixes.

The process involves removing common affixes (prefixes, suffixes) from words, resulting

in a simplified form that represents the word’s core meaning. Stemming is a heuristic

process and may only sometimes produce a valid word. Still, it is effective for tasks like

information retrieval, where the focus is on matching the essential meaning of words

rather than their grammatical correctness.

For example:

● running -> run

● jumps -> jump

● swimming -> swim

Stemming algorithms use various rules and heuristics to identify and remove affixes,

making them widely applicable in text-processing tasks to enhance information retrieval

and analysis.
Lemmatization

Lemmatization is a linguistic process that involves reducing words to their base or root

form, known as the lemma. The goal is to normalize different inflected forms of a word

so that they can be analyzed or compared more easily. This is particularly useful in

natural language processing (NLP) and text analysis.

For example:

● running -> running

● jumps -> jumps

● swimming -> swimming

Here’s how lemmatization generally works:

● Tokenization: The first step is to break down a text into individual words or

tokens. This can be done using various methods, such as splitting the text based

on spaces.

● POS Tagging: Parts-of-speech tagging involves assigning a grammatical

category (like noun, verb, adjective, etc.) to each token. Lemmatization often

relies on this information, as the base form of a word can depend on its

grammatical role in a sentence.

● Lemmatization: Once each word has been tokenized and assigned a

part-of-speech tag, the lemmatization algorithm uses a lexicon or linguistic rules

 to determine the lemma of each word. The lemma is the base form of the word,

which may not necessarily be the same as the word’s root. For example, the

lemma of “running” is “run,” and the lemma of “better” (in the context of an

adjective) is “good.”

● Applying Rules: Lemmatization algorithms often rely on linguistic rules and

patterns. For irregular verbs or words with multiple possible lemmas, these rules

help in making the correct lemmatization decision.

● Output: The result of lemmatization is a set of words in their base or dictionary

form, making it easier to analyze and understand the underlying meaning of a

text.

Lemmatization is distinct from stemming, another text normalization technique. While

stemming involves chopping off prefixes or suffixes from words to obtain a common

root, lemmatization aims for a valid base form through linguistic analysis. Lemmatization

tends to be more accurate but can be computationally more expensive than stemming.
Difference between stemming Vs. lemmatization
Stemming Lemmatization

Stemming is a process that stems or Lemmatization considers the context and

removes the last few characters from a converts the word to its meaningful base
word, often leading to incorrect meanings form, which is called Lemma.
and spelling.

For instance, stemming the word ‘History’ For instance, lemmatizing the word
would return ‘Histori‘. ‘History‘ would return ‘History‘.

Stemming is used in cases of large Lemmatization is computationally

datasets where performance is an issue. expensive since it involves look-up tables
and what not.
Stop words and Keywords Identification

In natural language processing (NLP), stop words are commonly used words
that are removed from text processing tasks because they don't carry much
meaning. Key words are identified using methods like YAKE, which analyzes
a text's structure, word usage, and co-occurrence patterns.

Stop words Key words

Definition Words that are commonly used but don't carry Words that are most
much meaning relevant to the content of a
document

Examples "A", "an", "the", "and", "is", "in", "on", "at", "with", Identified by methods like
"he", "she", "it", "they" YAKE

Purpose Reduced computational load, storage Summarize a document's

requirements, and make data more manageable content

Stop words are often removed from text processing tasks to ensure that

topically relevant documents rank highly in search results. For example, if a

search query is "what is a stop word?", a search system can eliminate the

words "what is a" and focus on documents that talk about stop words.
YAKE is a method that analyzes a text's structure, word usage, and

co-occurrence patterns to identify the most relevant keywords and key

phrases.

# Stopwords

import nltk

from nltk.corpus import stopwords

# Download NLTK stopwords and tokenizer models

nltk.download('stopwords')

nltk.download('punkt')

# Get English Language stopwords

english_stopwords = set(stopwords.words('english'))

print(english_stopwords)

The above program will give all stop words in English.

What’s the Difference Between Phonemes,
Graphemes, and Morphemes?

What’s A Phoneme?
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound. A phoneme is the smallest unit of spoken
sound and is often the one thing that distinguishes one word from another. For example,
cat and rat are only differentiated by the first phoneme. In many cases, a single letter
represents a single phoneme, but in most cases, there are multiple ways of
representing a particular phoneme in English spelling. And in the case of the letter x, it
is comprised of two phonemes /k/ & /s/.
Generally, the accepted belief is that there are 44 phonemes in English. This includes
short vowel sounds, long vowel sounds, digraph sounds such as /sh/, /th/ (voiced and
unvoiced), and /ch/, and single consonant sounds. Most people consider the diphthong
sounds /oy/ and /ou/ to be single phonemes as well. Linguistically, /ng/ and /ar/, /or/,
/er/, /ear/, /oar/, and schwa are also phonemes.
So, a single phoneme such as /n/ may be represented by letters in numerous different
ways such as n, nn, kn, gn, or pn. Phonemes can be indicated through the International
Phonemic Alphabet or by indicating a sound between slanted lines.

What’s A Grapheme?
In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest unit of a written language whether or
not it carries meaning or corresponds to a single phoneme. In different languages,
a grapheme may represent a syllable or unit of meaning.
Graphemes can include other printed symbols such as punctuation marks. In this
example, the grapheme <x> represents the phonemes /k//s/ while a single character in
Japanese may represent a syllable. Different types/fonts of a single letter are
considered the same grapheme. A basic alphabetic understanding and rapid recognition
is a necessary first step to learning to read. Your student’s ability to quickly, accurately,
and easily write graphemes is necessary for fluent writing and spelling.
When we are speaking purely about English, you will often see another definition of
grapheme. In this case, a grapheme is a letter or group of letters that represent a
single phoneme. This is a term used more or less synonymously with phonograms.
There are often numerous graphemes (or phonograms) that can represent a single
phoneme. For example, the /ā/ sound is a phoneme that can be represented by
numerous graphemes including ai, ay, ey, ei, eigh, a-e.
To make things even more confusing for young learners, a single grapheme such as ea
may represent three different phonemes /ē/, /ā/, or /ĕ/. While English has 26 letters and
44 phonemes, there are approximately 250 graphemes.

What’s A Morpheme?
Perhaps the most neglected term and concept in the study of teaching reading is the
morpheme. A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning that cannot be further
divided. So, a base word might be a morpheme, but a suffix, prefix, or root also
represents a morpheme. For example, the word red is a single morpheme, but the word
unpredictable is made of the morphemes un + pre + dict + able. While none of these
units stand alone as words, they are the smallest units of meaning.
Morphemes can vary tremendously in length from a single letter such as the prefix a- to
a place name derived from another language such as Massachusetts, which in English
represents a single morpheme. As students move into reading and writing more
sophisticated academic language, the concept of morphemes becomes increasingly
important to their decoding and their spelling as well as their ability to infer meanings of
new vocabulary. The root of a word makes tremendous differences in spelling words
with the -ion suffix for instance.