Natural Language Processing, or NLP, and What it Does

“Order food!” “Okay! What would you like?” This simple exchange could take up an entire hour’s discussion about NLP. Natural Language Processing is an area of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. It is mushrooming in importance. Understanding NLP and how it works is what Sam Wigglesworth specializes in. Her presentation on the Business School of AI’s “WeeklyWed” webinar takes us on a wild ride that includes everything from intent to sarcasm, chatbots to WhatsApp. Feast on this for a minute. You’ll understand how AI is changing our world.

First we’ll want to remember how quick computing is. Count how many times you’ve turned to a calculator rather than trying to figure out the problem in your head and you’ll see what I mean. Now consider language. Once the computer understands what’s being said, you’ll get an idea of how AI can do in a very short time what it might take a human a very long time to do. Now it has become possible to feed an entire manual on a complex issue and with NLP the process of finding what you want done becomes a lot more simple.

Intent is at the forefront of the discussion. What you want to do comes first. Ordering food will obviously involve a product, a size, and probably a brand or type. Think cheese. What kind? How much, etc. Once intent is defined then we can get into semantics. This is where the algorithms come in, mathematical formulas trained to find patterns and make decisions. Incorporate them into neural networks that are modeled to work like the human brain and you get to an important part of AI, Machine Learning. NLP is driven in large party by Machine Learning, a subset of AI.

“Blow my mind”

Machine learning focuses on building apps. These applications within ML learn from data over time. Imagine how much data a language contains. Blow my mind. The idiom “blow my mind” represents just a smidgeon of what would need to be understood. Think of the many linguistic and semantic features of language. This amounts to a ton of data. This is where NLP learns in weeks what takes a human many years.

With advances in NLP come big money. The market for Chatbot as an example is expected to be worth around $1.25-billion in a few years. Chatbot tools in themselves are designed to make your life easier, enabling a better customer experience and improving productivity. Do that in the 23 languages spoken by more than half the world and you get an idea of the market for NLP, and why you should position yourself in the technology changing our world.

Note: Sam Wigglesorth is the founder of The Language School and Girls and Boys In Tech from Oxford who is the NLP instructor at Business School of AI, the brainchild of Sudha Jamthe

The Author: Henry Mulak is a journalist and teacher in Silicon Valley covering the technology sector, specializing in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.