So, I've been wondering for a while now, how would I go about something like Natural Language Processing? Preferably, I would want to write the code in C/C++, but I don't really care that much. So, any ideas anyone?

-Bindernews

what's your end goal? to be able to ask your program a question and have it come up with a logical answer, or have it be able to break down the parts of a sentence i.e. sentences into clauses & phrases, clauses & phrases into individual parts of speech?

everyone else said it, but i have to repeat: to what end?
if you're making a game that uses text as input, searching for a few keywords and phrases can be enough, but other things are more difficult.

that sounds like a situation that could be handled through keywords as well. for example, your parser could take things like "let" or "set" as tip off words that the following is an equals statement, have "variable" indicate that the next word is a varname, etcetera.

the hardest part of something like this would probably be words that can be interpreted to mean different things according to context. for example, "and" could be used to separate different lines of code:
set variable MyName to 5 and increment it. (incidentally, dealing with pronouns could be tough as well)
or
increment variable MyName while it is less than 4 and greater than 1

the only way i can think of for dealing with something like that is to have while make whatever is next be interpreted as a boolean value, up until the next punctuation.

What is the scope of this project? Is it to make a full language or just to make certain programming routines easier?

One of the problems with a natural language program is that lots of fiddly stuff, like the maths controlling how a sprite moves on a screen, can't easily be expressed.

But you might want to take a look at logic based programming languages such as Prolog, as they are pretty much used exclusively for this type of work. They make it easier to build the relationships needed between words, to allow you to better work out context.

Looking on Wikipedia I also found this natural programming language, which looks pretty cool. It's hello world program is:
I want window and the window title is Hello World.


Try third party libraries such as OpenNLP (unfortunately in Java). It may do the whole parsing job but it should really help you with the initial language parsing.