12.1 INtroduCtIoN 327
body of knowledge about the world that comes from outside the docu-
ment. Though it is easy for people to choose the right sense of a word, it
is extremely difficult to program a computer with all the world knowledge
necessary to do the same.
These levels of linguistic processing reflect an increasing amount of unit
analysis as well as increasing complexity and difficulty as we move from the
phonological level to pragmatics. The larger the unit of analysis becomes
(i.e., from morpheme to word, to sentence, to paragraph, and to full docu-
ment), the less precise the language phenomena. This decrease in precision
results in fewer discernible rules and more reliance on less predictable regu-
larities as