NLP is embedded in a lot of applications we use every day. It helps us in the search process on Google, translation, email filtration, and more. With all of its benefits, companies are struggling to implement it in their businesses.
But what’s NLP?
NLP Definition
NLP or Natural Language Processing is a subfield of computer science and Artificial Intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language. It processes and analyzes a huge amount of the natural language data in order to learn and improve itself.
NLP Methods
There are two types of methods for the NLP:
1- Statistical
This type relies on Machine Learning (ML) and can learn through the analysis of data extracted from more than one corpus. It used statistical models to make probabilistic decisions. This type can evaluate the certainty of many different answers rather than only one.
2- Neural Networks (NN)
This technique has become popular since 2010. It takes use of word embedding to capture the semantics of the word instead of relying on separate intermediate tasks.
NLP Applications
As NLP is considered an important part in every system that have an interaction between computers and human language, many businesses used it according to their needs, and here’s some of the real world applications for NLP:
1- Search Engines
Google processes 3.5 billion searches everyday. With this huge amount of searches, there should be a system that can do it right.
If you want to search in Google for men’s shoes and you type “men’s s”, Google will show you suggestions of relevant searches that you might be interested in. In this process, Google uses NLP and some other factors to display suggestions.
Same thing happens when you type a word or a sentence wrong, Google will understand what you type and direct you to the right results.
A simple way to understand this mechanism, if we think of Google as they count the number of searches for the word “world” and the number of searches for the word “wolrd”, the number of searches for the first will be relatively bigger to the second. So, it will suggest you the right word.
2- Translation
When you use a service like Google Translator to translate some sentences, Google uses NLP in this process. With today’s powerful machines, you can break the barrier between languages and convert a text from one to another very easily.
3- Chatbots
A lot of businesses apply chatbots in their services that need a customer conversation. And with the chatbots, they can do it automatically with the customer without any other human interaction.
This technology uses both NLP and Machine Learning to do it right. You can refer to our previous article of chatbots to know more about.
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4- Survey analysis
Imagine that you’re an airline business that wants to know their customers’ feedback about previous flights through twitter. Of course, you can use tools to see all mentions of your business, but will you be able to read all of them?
Well, it will take a very long time for this process, but with the help of NLP you can program such a process to be done automatically. After that you can see all positive and negative feedback as well as the satisfaction rate for the customers and more.
5- Targeted Advertising
Targeted advertising is simply showing ads to users according to their online activities. Like if you search on Google for cakes and after a while you open Facebook and see an ad of cakes.
With the help of NLP, they can know exactly what you are looking for and recognize it, then take advantage of that for advertising.
6- Voice assistants
In a previous article we talked about voice assistants in detail. Voice assistant can be one of the most innovative NLP and Speech Recognition applications. They can do you a lot of work helping you everyday in searching, scheduling, monitoring, and more.
You can refer to our voice assistants article to know more information.
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7- Recruitment and Hiring process
All businesses come to a point where they need to hire new people. Even if this is a must process, but at the same time it’s a very exhausting one.
Recruiters usually take less than a minute scanning each CV to see if this candidate is good for them. With the help of NLP they can do this process faster by looking for specific patterns of words that they’re looking for in order to minimize the effort.
8- Email Filtering
Email filtering process is done automatically for a lot of email providers with NLP. A simple example for that is to categorize promotional emails if they contain words like “offers” or “deals”.
You can read more about email filtering using ML if you want.
(Article Link)
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