Natural Language Processing — a beginners guide

Natural Language Processing or NLP is a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence that helps computers interpret and process human language for the modelling and predictive tasks.

NLP is considered to be one of the toughest fields in Artificial Intelligence as understanding human language, having multiple rules and exceptions, by machines and responding back in human language, after following all the necessary rules, is very difficult. For ages programmers are trying to build applications that are capable of doing so and have succeeded to a great extent.

Use cases of NLP:

Natural Language Processing has become a vital part of every product which involves interaction in human language. Let’s start with a few examples:

1. Sentiment Analysis: These days almost all companies have a reviews section on their website or mobile application. For example, an e-commerce business giant, Amazon, has a reviews section for every product that is being sold on the platform. Ever wondered how these reviews are being analysed? Are there millions of employees who are reading the reviews to analyse? No. All this process is carried using the NLP techniques.
2. Chatbots: The first digital virtual voice assistant on a cellphone, Siri, launched in 2011 by Apple, has come far in terms of accuracy and responses. All this improvement is done by feeding the chatbots with millions of rows of data.
3. Translation: NLP is used in…