Natural Language Processing

How to make your computer understand you through ‘your’ language!

Hello Readers! Please do not close your browser because of the three seemingly heavy words in the topic. I am fully aware that the mountain of content on the web has overwhelmed you and now you are probably looking for an article that explains Natural language processing (NLP) to you in a way you can explain it to your stubborn younger sibling.

Components in NLP

Well, Congratulations! You have landed at the right place at the right time. I have written this article with two goals-

1. To bring a smile to your face and
2. To induce an interest in you concerning NLP

I will try my best to achieve these goals with my content.

So, we all love to talk, right? (my personal favorite activity). It is the basic way we express ourselves. And a few months back, the planet surpassed the 8 billion population mark. Now, for example, you need to ask 8 billion people about their favorite Taylor Swift song (c’mon, everybody has one) and how they feel about it (just to analyze various emotions generated in people while listening to music), it is going to generate a gazillion responses.

Talk your talk and go viral xD

A single person might give you a song and various ideas on why he/she likes it. Note how a single individual can generate so many words, keywords, and sentences, each corresponding to a certain level of complexity. All in all, a huge amount of information is in your bag. And if you want to scale and analyze the information spoken by 8 BILLION PEOPLE, the situation cannot be handled and will become unimaginably huge.

This data is your unstructured data, which is basically a representation of how data is in the real world. Super messy and hard to manipulate.

Here comes the introduction to the technical aspect of this issue — Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (ChatGPT has entered the conversation). With advances in AI and ML models, a big revolution is going on regarding this topic.

Natural Language Processing or NLP is the sub-field of AI that focuses on enabling computers to understand and process human languages. It gives machines, the ability to read, understand and derive meaning from human languages.

Putting it in simple terms, NLP handles human language automatically (hope you smiled here). It seems fascinating, right? Because it is! It has multiple applications in the real world which I am going to list down for you so that you get an idea.

1. NLP can help recognize and predict diseases based on electronic health records and patients’ speech. This ability is being explored in health conditions ranging from cardiovascular diseases to depression and even schizophrenia.
2. Organizations can determine what customers are saying about a service or product by identifying and extracting information from sources like social media. This sentiment analysis can provide heaps of information about customers’ choices and their decision drivers.
3. Our dear friends, Amazon’s Alexa, and Apple’s Siri are examples of intelligent voice-driven interfaces that use NLP to respond to vocal prompts and perform tasks like finding a particular shop, telling the weather forecast, or turning on the lights at home.

Amidst all the cool stuff related to NLP, do not forget that the future in this field is extremely challenging. But with the discipline developing at a very fast pace, we are likely to reach a level that will make complex applications possible. I have fulfilled my duty to generate a spark in you, now fuel yourself and explore more and more for who knows? You might bring a breakthrough and become the next Ada Lovelace or John McCarthy.

Goodbye!