What is natural language processing?
Natural language processing, commonly called NLP, is a field at the intersection of linguistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, and more recently, human-computer interaction.
At the technical level, NLP can be incredibly complex. But at the simplest level, NLP is the field of study concerned with how we analyze language data, like text and audio, with computers.
Some of the more compelling subfields of NLP are natural language understanding (NLU), natural language generation (NLG), and speech recognition.
What is natural language processing for dummies?
Natural language processing is simply the way we program computers to analyze information containing human language.
Where is natural language processing used?
Natural language processing is become more ubiquitous by the day. People in all settings are interacting with products that use NLP to provide value to the end-users. NLP is used in chatbots, search algorithms, speech-to-text, machine translation, speech recognition, sentiment analysis, applicant tracking systems, email spam filtering, social media, and numerous other parts of your life.
Why is natural language processing needed?
NLP is needed because computers use various types of code as their language. NLP allows us to translate human, or natural, language into numbers and code that a computer can understand and analyze.
Once the human language is translated into numerical values, computers can then leverage various processes and techniques to provide value to people.