Back to basics – What is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?
NLP is a subfield of artificial intelligence that deals with the interaction between computers and human languages. NLP techniques are used to analyze and understand human language, and can be used for a wide range of tasks such as:
- Text classification:
Automatic categorization of text into predefined categories or topics.
- Sentiment analysis
Determining the sentiment or emotional tone of text.
- Named entity recognition:
Identifying and extracting specific information such as people, organizations, and locations from text.
- Part-of-speech tagging
Dentifying the grammatical role of each word in a sentence.
- Parsing
Analyzing the grammatical structure of a sentence to determine its syntactic tree.
- Coreference resolution:
Determining when two or more expressions in text refer to the same entity.
- Machine translation
Translating text from one language to another.
- Text summarization
Creating a condensed version of text that retains its key information.
- Question answering
Providing an automatic and correct answer to a question asked in natural language.
NLP is already widely used in various applications such as chatbots, virtual assistants, sentiment analysis, language translation, and text analysis for businesses. NLP is also widely used in social media monitoring, marketing, and customer service.