Natural Language Processing, or NLP, is a branch of AI that focuses on enabling machines to understand, interpret, and generate human language.
It’s the technology behind chatbots, voice assistants, translation tools, and text analytics. Essentially, NLP allows computers to make sense of text and speech the way humans do.
How NLP Works
NLP involves multiple steps:
- Text Preprocessing: Tokenization, stemming, lemmatization, removing stopwords
- Feature Extraction: Converting text into numbers or vectors (e.g., Bag of Words, TF-IDF, embeddings)
- Modeling: Applying machine learning or deep learning models to perform tasks
- Postprocessing: Converting model outputs into human-readable or actionable results
Key NLP Tasks
- Text Classification: Spam detection, sentiment analysis
- Named Entity Recognition (NER): Identify names, places, dates in text
- Machine Translation: Translating between languages
- Speech Recognition: Converting audio into text
- Question Answering: Chatbots and virtual assistants
Advantages of NLP
- Automates understanding of massive text data
- Enables better customer interactions
- Improves accessibility with voice and text interfaces
- Powers AI applications like chatbots, translators, and sentiment analysis
Real-World Examples
- Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant
- Email spam filters
- Language translation apps (Google Translate)
- Social media sentiment analysis
- Customer support chatbots
Conclusion
NLP bridges the gap between humans and machines by enabling computers to understand human language. It’s one of the most exciting areas of AI today.
Citations
https://savanka.com/category/learn/ai-and-ml/
https://www.w3schools.com/ai/