What is Natural Language Processing?

What’s this about: Natural language processing, or NLP, can be defined as the study and application of specific tools that enable computers to process, analyze, and interpret human language. NLP combines the different fields of linguistics and computer science, and it is a component of artificial intelligence (AI).

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NLP has been around for over 50 years, and most of today’s applications revolve around digital assistants like Siri and Alexa, chatbots, machine translation, and search engines. However, it is also used in fields like medical research and business intelligence.

The Basics of NLP

One of the greatest advancements of modern computers is their ability to interpret human language, which is unbelievably complex. But for this to be done, language must be converted in a way that computers can comprehend and manipulate, and machines must identify patterns within the language and extract data from, for example, the thousands of words within a document. One of the major challenges involves the difficulty of interpreting human language, which is incredibly complex with words and phrases having several different meanings to different groups of people. Context is everything, and we humans have our own way of injecting sarcasm and other types of sentiment.