NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING: WHAT IS IT?

Natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence that deals with analyzing, understanding, and generating human languages. The main thrust of NLP is to enable computers to communicate with people using everyday language.

The technology leverages computer programs that can ‘read’ natural languages the same way humans do – by analyzing words, phrases, sentences, and discourse to derive meaning. That allows humans to interact with computers through voice commands or free-form text rather than strict programming languages.

Top tasks that NLP handles would be:

– Text analysis: Identifying parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives), extracting entities (people, organizations, locations), determining sentiment, and parsing syntax. It allows computers to break down text and understand grammatical relationships.

– Machine translation: Automatically translating text from one language to another using advanced statistical models. That enables real-time translation across languages at scale.

– Speech recognition: Transcribing audio recordings of human speech into text, which powers voice interfaces and voice assistants.

– Text generation: Producing written narratives that sound natural. Applications include conversational agents (chatbots), summarization, and creative writing aids.

– Information retrieval: Matching user queries to relevant documents in a collection and extracting answers from text. Search engines rely heavily on NLP.

Underlying many of these applications are word embeddings – vector representations of word meanings that allow easier generalization. Deep learning techniques like recurrent neural networks and transformers have also advanced NLP by better handling context and semantics.

As computational power and datasets grow, NLP will become even more accurate at understanding nuanced human language. That will enable more intuitive human-computer interaction through multi-turn dialog for purposes ranging from customer service to education. The whole point is communicating with technology as naturally as if conversing with another person.