When thinking about NLP technology, we often may not realise that we use it regularly. In fact, it’s probably more common than you think.
Natural language processing (NLP) has proven itself to be revolutionary technology. Its applications are growing and helping to power other very useful technologies. With examples of NLP dating back to 1950, it’s been used for real-world applications (like the ones I will discuss here) as well as part of solving a larger issue at hand. In this post, I’ll give you a very brief overview of what NLP is and some everyday examples of NLP tasks.
What is NLP
NLP is the point where linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence meet. The goal being to program a computer to be able to process, analyse and derive meaning from large amounts of natural human language data.
Before I dive into the examples, I want to put my linguist hat on to discuss a misconception about language quickly. I’ve noticed that people sometimes talk about how languages don’t follow a set of strict rules citing the large number of exceptions and confusing spelling rules. While it is true that human language is complex, dismissing the existence of rules because of inconsistencies is foolish at best. Human language is governed by grammar (a set of rules) but also by other verbal cues such as tone or intonation, as well as non-verbal cues like context and body language. This is why the technology that is available now, compared to that available 70 years ago, is considered revolutionary and is changing our lives for the better.
5 NLP applications in everyday life:
Now the fun part - the real life examples.
