Ever wondered what is Natural language processing (NLP)!!
Natural language processing (NLP) is a sub-domain of linguistics, computer science and Artificial Intelligence (AI). We human speak languages that are known as the natural language that evolves with us naturally, We use Grammar(syntax of language), context (semantic of language) to communicate with other people. But the computer doesn’t understand our languages like us, it only understands 0’s and 1’s. To make a computer understand our language we use Natural language processing(NLP).
Natural Language Processing is not a new thing, it started around 1960.
In early days most of the natural processing language systems were designed by hand-coding rules, then people started using machine learning techniques to automatically learn those rules and applying on a large set of documents(a.k.a. corpora)
Natural language processing is consist of two things:
NLU (natural language understanding): which enables the computer to understand the natural language, in other words, converting text to 0’s and 1’s so that a computer can make sense out of the text.
NLG (natural language generation ): This makes the computer generating natural language like a human. i.e. a computer can reply to you in a chatbot etc.
Where natural language processing is being used:
A lot of companies use them from a tech giant like (FANG) to small startups. NLP is being used to create chatbots, to shot relevant resume, to analyse lot and lot of text data like news and get meaningful insight from it etc.
Now you know what is NLP and you might be thinking where to start and how to start.
I would suggest these libraries to get started :
- nltk
- CoreNLP
- Spacy
- Gensim
- scikit learn
or try an online version of Stanford coreNLP online
Here you can start with Syntactic Analysis like:
- Grammar induction
- Lemmatization
- Morphological segmentation
- pos(parts of speech)
- parsing
- sentence breaking
- stemming
- word segmentation
- terminology extraction
Thanks for reading.
