Natural Language Processing

What is natural language processing (NPL)? NPL, in a general sense, is a subset of artificial intelligence which helps computers understand and manipulate human language. It uses ideas from computer science and computational linguistics to try to create a bridge between human language and computer interpretation of that language.

Recently, the interest of machine-human communication has increased at a rapid rate thanks to profitable applications of it. It is important to distinguish human language and computer language. As a human, you could speak several different languages such as English, Chinese, or Spanish based on where you lived and grew up. However, a computer’s language, known as machine code or language, is mostly not understandable the average person. This can be broken down even further into a series of 1s and zeros which produce logical actions.

NPL is important for two main reasons: large volume of textual data and structuring unstructured data. Through the amount of data produced every day, it is impossible for any person to reliable go through all of it. It needs to be automated such that all this textual data can be analyzed and later stored.

Even though it may not seem like it, human language is very diverse and complex. There are many ways to express the same thing in writing and verbally. There are also hundreds of different languages and dialects which allow for further diversity. NPL allows for structure in such things such as speech recognition or textual analytics.