What is NLP?
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the field of AI that focuses on helping computers understand, interpret, and generate human language. It is what makes chatbots, translation, and voice assistants work.
NLP in Plain English
Human language is complex. The same words can mean different things depending on context. Sarcasm, idioms, spelling mistakes, and cultural references make text difficult even for humans to process consistently.
NLP is the area of AI that deals with this complexity. It gives computers the tools to:
- Understand what a piece of text means
- Extract useful information from text
- Generate human-sounding text
- Translate between languages
- Answer questions in natural language
- Convert speech to text and text to speech
Deep Learning ⊂ Machine Learning ⊂ Artificial Intelligence
NLP Applications You Use Every Day
- Email: Gmail filters spam and sorts emails into Primary, Social, and Promotions using NLP
- Search: Google understands your search intent, not just the exact words
- Voice assistants: Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant understand spoken natural language
- Translation: Google Translate and DeepL convert text between languages
- Autocomplete: your phone keyboard predicts the next word using language models
- Chatbots: customer service bots on websites understand questions and give answers
- Grammar checkers: Grammarly reads your text and suggests corrections
- Sentiment analysis: companies monitor social media to understand how customers feel about their products
Tip
Tip
NLP and computer vision together cover the two most important types of unstructured data: text and images. These are the two areas where deep learning has made the biggest impact. If you want to work on AI systems that interact with real-world data, learning NLP is essential.
Key Takeaways
- Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the field of AI that focuses on helping computers understand, interpret, and generate human language.
- Email: Gmail filters spam and sorts emails into Primary, Social, and Promotions using NLP
- Search: Google understands your search intent, not just the exact words
- Voice assistants: Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant understand spoken natural language