Natural Language Processing, or NLP as it is commonly known, is a branch of artificial intelligence that deals with the interaction between computers and humans using the natural language. The ultimate objective of NLP is to read, decipher, understand, and make sense of the human languages in a manner that is valuable. It refers to analytics tasks that deal with natural human language, in the form of text or speech.
NLP involves reading and understanding of spoken/written language through the medium of a computer. This includes, the automatic translation of one language into another, but also spoken word recognition, or the automatic answering of questions.
The study of NLP has been around for more than 50 years and grew rapidly with the rise of computers. NLP extracts meaning from human language to make decisions based on the information. This technology is still evolving, but there are many ways natural language processing is used today.
Everyday innumerable words are used and with the help of NLP, it is amazing to see how a machine understands human speech, and one that has huge potential to impact so much in our modern existence. Many businesses are daily exploring how they can continuously learn on this technology and offer customers a frictionless experience with the benefits that NLP can provide.
Let us look at some scenarios where NLP is used :
While looking out or applying for jobs or even online shopping, we have seen a website chat box. The chat box interacts in the sane way as a human would interact. These are algorithms which use NLP that understand what we are trying to say and then respond to it accordingly.
Auto-correct, grammar and spell check, as well as auto-complete, are enabled by NLP. The spam filter on our email system uses NLP to determine what emails we would like to keep in our inbox and what is likely a spam.
Well, these are just very few instances where NLP is used. As businesses continue to experiment and develop enhancements to NLP, we can expect that NLP will become even better and more influential for business in the very near future.