WHAT IS NLP AND WHY IT MATTERS

Hello everyone!!

In this post, you will find out what is the meaning of natural language processing is and why it is so important.

NLP or Natural Language Processing  is defined as the automatic manipulation of natural language, like text and speech, by intellectual application software.

It is the field of artificial intelligence .NLP gives machine the ability to read,understand and derive meaning from human language.It is discipline  and technique that focuses on the interaction between machine learning and human language and is scaling to many industries. In other words, it is an approach to process, analyze and understand large amount of data that is being generated every day.




In addition to human language understanding, this field is also occupied with teaching computers to generate human language, so that they can make you think that you are talking with an real human being. I'm sure you have experienced virtual assistants.




Now the question arrives why NLP is important ??

“The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Man is unbelievably slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. The marriage of the two is a force beyond calculation.” 
– Leo Cherne


Human knowledge is limited, while today, in the big data century , the computer has access to almost unlimited knowledge. So what if we taught computers to understand us human beings?
Of course, some of these applications already exist. They are using NLP to implement such applications.

1. Handling large volumes of text data

Let’s face it. There are billions of text data being generated every day.

Look around.

In-apps messages (Whats app, WeChat, Telegram etc.), social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube etc.), forums (Quora, Reddit etc.), blogs, news publishing platforms, google searches and many other channels.

All these channels are constantly generating large amount of text data every minute daily.
And because of the large volumes of text data as well as the highly unstructured data source, we can no longer use the common approach to understand the text and this is where NLP comes in.

With the big data technology, NLP has entered the mainstream as this approach can now be applied to handle large volumes of text data via cloud/distributed computing at an unprecedented speed.

2.Structuring highly unstructured data source

Human language is astoundingly complex and diverse.  When we speak, most of the time we have regional accents, and  sometimes we mumble, stutter and borrow terms from other languages too. 

NLP is important because it helps resolve ambiguity in language and adds useful numeric structure to the data for many downstream applications, such as speech recognition or text analytics. 

Thanks for reading.

Hope you find my article helpful.
If you have any doubts,ask your questions in the comments below and I will do my best to answer.
By Ashwini Ghode