NLP Research
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the process of a computer interpreting, understanding and manipulating human language and it is becoming an increasingly essential aspect of artificial intelligence (What is Natural). NLP is important because a computer must be able to communicate with its users and provide the experience that the user is looking for. Humans have many different styles and ways of communicating language. It is still difficult for computers to interpret written language due to different penmanship’s and verbal language due to slang, dialects, and accents. Natural Language Processing has many practical uses such as analyzing pieces of text for insights, enabling chatbots such as Amazon’s Alexa, translating texts into different languages such as Google Translate, and summarizing large documents (Fern 6). In artificial intelligence, NLP is used as a way for a computer to make sense of unstructured data. Many Robotics Process Automation products include NLP as a main tool to help combat the huge amounts of unstructured data. While NLP cannot yet handle unstructured data in full, it can pull structured data out of unstructured data, making the data easier to work with. As I have learned from MIS2502, in order to perform data analytics using ETL or SQL, the data must be well structured in tables or in excel. NLP allows for the extraction of structured data from social media, chatbots, large pieces of text, and images (Fern 8). Once that data is extracted, a data scientist can use SQL to insert the data into a data warehouse or analyze the data for trends and insights. NLP transforms the unstructured data into usable information and then companies can use that data to improve efficiency.
Bibliography:
Halper, Fern. “Advanced Analytics: Moving Toward AI, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing.” tdwi.org, Transforming Data with Intelligence, 2017
What Is Natural Language Processing?” SAS, SAS, www.sas.com/en_us/insights/analytics/what- is-natural-language-processing-nlp.html.