The document discusses the processing of written language. It explains that written language is an invented representation of oral language that must be taught, unlike oral language which is acquired naturally. It also outlines the main steps involved in processing written text, including morphological analysis, syntactic analysis, semantic analysis, discourse integration, and pragmatic analysis. The goal is to map written language to a target representation based on the context and task. Success in natural language processing has been difficult due to noise, ambiguity and the need to understand context.