Looking into Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence. It helps computers understand, interpret and manipulate human text language. Today there is an enormous amount of emails, social media text, video stream, customer reviews, customer support requests, etc. All of these textual data become the perfect place to apply NLP. We need NLP tools and techniques to process, analyze, and understand unstructured “big data” in order to release the power in analytics. In this post, I will explain natural language processing in a layman’s term. Then talk about what kind of work is involved in NLP. I also will clarify the difference between speech recognition and NLP. Then finally I will cover the machine learning algorithms for NLP.

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What is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?

Humans communicate with each other by using natural language such as English, Chinese, French or Russian. A computer algorithm cannot understand a natural language but is able to process the natural language in order to make interactions between computers or humans feel exactly like interactions between humans and humans…