What Is Natural Language Processing?

Siri, Alexa, and Cortana are all examples of Natural language Processing. But what is Natural language Processing?

First, let's have quick recap of the article what is Machine Learning? Machine Learning is making machines that are able to find and learn patterns from data.

What is NLP? NLP is a domain in Machine Learning that deals with Human Language.

Now, What is Human Language? We humans communicate mostly by text or voice, so that's human language.

Even now, when you are reading this article, what you are encountering is text, and you are also understanding it. In the same way, if you make machines understand and respond to text or voice data that is Natural Language Processing.

There are two components in NLP:

  1. Natural Language Understanding (NLU)
  2. Natural Language Generation (NLG)

First, let's discuss NLU. If you give the text phrase "Apple is Red in Color" to a Machine it can't understand that.

The above sentence is an unstructured one. So NLU helps the machine to understand and analyze human language by extracting content such as concepts, keywords, emotions, etc from the Unstructured Sentence.

Now you should guess what NLG is? It's the opposite of NLU, generating the structured data(Computer Data) back to Natural Language.

Here are some examples of Natural Language Processing:

  1. Siri, Alexa & Cortana
  2. Chatbots
  3. Language Translators
  4. Speech to Text Convertors
  5. Search Auto Correct and Auto Complete
  6. Sentiment Analysis
  7. Text Summarization