Last Updated on February 16, 2024 by Saira Farman
Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming one of the most dominant strategic industries in the world. The reason for this is that artificial intelligence which is making breakthroughs in all disciplines of science. Artificial intelligence systems are being used to analyze all types of data such as video footage, unstructured text, and images from all over the world. Some analysts argue that without artificial intelligence, we would be unable to send emails, search the web, diagnose symptoms of disease, predict the future, or even to compete in global business markets.
Natural language processing (NLP) is also a subfield of computer science, linguistics, and artificial intelligence related to the interactions between humans and computers, particularly how to program such computers to process and analyze huge amounts of natural language data and thereby make useful communications. The applications of NLP include things like writing search engine optimization articles, composing advertising copy for websites, or even understanding a foreign language such as Mandarin. In all these endeavors, the key is understanding how human languages work. Natural language processing can help us understand how the brain constructs sentences, how it assigns meaning to words and phrases, and how we can construct sentences and thoughts on the fly without being stuck in the very same thought treadmill that has kept us stagnant for centuries.
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Technicalities In NLP
Natural language processing methods include things like tokenization, word grouping, word identification, word extraction, domain modeling, and more. tokenization is the process of manually writing words and phrases for a database, e.g., “A man and his dog go for a walk.” Domain modeling is the task of using words and concepts in sentences so that the meaning can be deduced from the structure of the vocabulary and the way each word and phrase are used. Lastly, keyword extraction is the process of finding meaningful phrases in a massive pile of text and finding connections to other words and phrases.
If you’re interested in applying NLP to your own business, you’ll first need to do some basic research on the scientific properties of human language use, e.g. understanding the concepts of word associations and the meaning behind sentences. In order to apply this knowledge to business, you’ll need to learn some of the tools of the trade, such as the Natural Language Processing Toolkit (NLP), which was developed by Oxford Martin School of Business to help developers build intelligent conversational software. The NLP toolkit includes a number of tools, including linguistic modeling, an extensive database of spoken corpora, and reinforcement learning.
Application Of NLP
We can see natural language processing in action at Imurgence blog wherein the text is automatically rendered in human voice on click of a button. This can help in reinforcement learning for many. Voice and text together has better impact on learning. Imurgence uses Machine learning to have a better impact of users learning enhancement.
There’s a growing trend toward NLP and big data, especially with NLP practitioners coming together to form associations and advisory groups to share best practices and drive standards across the field. These groups are starting to learn how natural language processing can help them conduct more accurate analysis of large volumes of unstructured text. For instance, by combining traditional text mining techniques with NLP, it’s possible to quickly and accurately classify and sort through terabytes and even petabytes of structured data sets.
Advantages Of NLP
Another benefit of NLP is its ability to generalize from limited data sets. For example, if you have an initial list of customer characteristics, you may be able to generalize from that list to identify the characteristics of a potential buyer. NLP will then be able to drill down from customer characteristics to more specific attributes. This means you can create more accurate forecasts and recommendations, even for complex and structured subjects like customer satisfaction surveys.
However, the technology behind NLP is much more advanced than those tools. As we continue to develop more sophisticated tools for NLP, we’ll see an increasing number of companies that use artificial intelligence to perform natural language processing tasks, rather than human employees. Companies that do this include such companies as Google, who are continually working on speech recognition and language translation. The real question is how well do we understand the way that NLP tools work, and how do we make the right decisions for our businesses? To date, we’ve been slow to adapt, which is why many of today’s most cutting-edge technologies, including artificial intelligence and the emerging science of NLP, are being applied to the way that business is done.
Next Steps
A further step from this would be Natural Language Generation, wherein human-like speech and text content can be created using a combination of NLP and other machine learning techniques.
