Natural Language

Processing (NLP)
MB 108
What is NLP
• Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of
computer science and artificial intelligence (AI) that
uses machine learning to enable computers to
understand and communicate with human language.

• NLP enables computers and digital devices to recognize,

understand and generate text and speech by combining
computational linguistics—the rule-based modeling of
human language—together with statistical modeling,
machine learning and deep learning.
Natural Language Processing
• NLP research has helped enable the era of generative AI, from the
communication skills of large language models (LLMs) to the ability
of image generation models to understand requests.

• NLP powers search engines, prompting chatbots for customer

service with spoken commands, voice-operated GPS systems and
question-answering digital assistants on smartphones such as
Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana.

• NLP also plays a growing role in enterprise solutions that help

streamline and automate business operations, increase employee
productivity and simplify business processes.
Benefits of NLP
• NLP makes it easier for humans to communicate and
collaborate with machines, by allowing them to do so in
the natural human language they use every day.

This offers benefits across many industries and

applications.
• Automation of repetitive tasks
• Improved data analysis and insights
• Enhanced search
• Content generation
Automation of repetitive tasks
• NLP is especially useful in fully or partially automating
tasks like customer support, data entry and document
handling.
• NLP tools can automatically classify, extract key information
and summarize content, reducing the time and errors
associated with manual data handling.
• NLP facilitates language translation, converting text from
one language to another while preserving meaning, context
and nuances.
• Eg - NLP-powered chatbots can handle routine customer
queries, freeing up human agents for more complex issues.
Improved data analysis
• NLP enhances data analysis by enabling the extraction of insights from
unstructured text data, such as customer reviews, social media posts and
news articles.
• By using text mining techniques, NLP can identify patterns, trends and
sentiments that are not immediately obvious in large datasets.
• Sentiment analysis enables the extraction of subjective qualities—attitudes,
emotions, sarcasm, confusion or suspicion—from text.
• This is often used for routing communications to the system or the person
most likely to make the next response.
• This allows businesses to better understand customer preferences, market
conditions and public opinion.
• NLP tools can also perform categorization and summarization of vast
amounts of text, making it easier for analysts to identify key information and
make data-driven decisions more efficiently.
Enhanced search
• NLP benefits search by enabling systems to understand
the intent behind user queries, providing more accurate
and contextually relevant results.
• Instead of relying solely on keyword matching, NLP-
powered search engines analyze the meaning of words
and phrases, making it easier to find information even
when queries are vague or complex.
• This improves user experience, whether in web
searches, document retrieval or enterprise data
systems.
Powerful content generation
• NLP powers advanced language models to create human-like text for
various purposes.
• Pre-trained models, such as GPT-4, can generate articles, reports,
marketing copy, product descriptions and even creative writing based
on prompts provided by users.
• NLP-powered tools can also assist in automating tasks like drafting
emails, writing social media posts or legal documentation.
• By understanding context, tone and style, NLP sees to it that the
generated content is coherent, relevant and aligned with the intended
message, saving time and effort in content creation while maintaining
quality.
Approaches to NLP
• NLP combines the power of computational linguistics together
with machine learning algorithms and deep learning.
• Computational linguistics uses data science to analyze language
and speech.
• It includes two main types of analysis: syntactical analysis and
semantical analysis.
• Syntactical analysis determines the meaning of a word, phrase or
sentence by parsing the syntax of the words and applying
preprogrammed rules of grammar.
• Semantical analysis uses the syntactic output to draw meaning
from the words and interpret their meaning within the sentence
structure.
Approaches to NLP
The parsing of words can take one of two forms -
• Dependency parsing looks at the relationships between
words, such as identifying nouns and verbs, while
constituency parsing then builds a parse tree (or syntax
tree): a rooted and ordered representation of the
syntactic structure of the sentence or string of words.
• The resulting parse trees underly the functions of
language translators and speech recognition. Ideally,
this analysis makes the output—either text or speech—
understandable to both NLP models and people.
Approaches to NLP
• Self-supervised learning (SSL) in particular is useful for
supporting NLP because NLP requires large amounts of
labeled data to train AI models.
• Because these labeled datasets require time-consuming
annotation—a process involving manual labeling by
humans—gathering sufficient data can be prohibitively
difficult.
• Self-supervised approaches can be more time-effective
and cost-effective, as they replace some or all manually
labeled training data.