Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. As part of artificial intelligence, it tries to simulate human communication by programming computers to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data.

Key Concepts in NLP

  • Tokenization: The process of splitting text into words, phrases, symbols, or other meaningful elements called tokens.
  • Part-of-Speech Tagging: Assigning a part of speech to each word in a sentence, such as noun, verb, adjective, etc.
  • Named Entity Recognition (NER): Identifying entities in text such as names of people, organizations, locations, medical codes, time expressions, quantities, monetary values, percentages, etc.
  • Sentiment Analysis: The use of text analysis to identify and extract subjective information from source materials.

Applications of NLP

  • Chatbots and Virtual Assistants: Used to automate customer service and provide 24/7 support.
  • Machine Translation: Translating text from one language to another.
  • Text Summarization: Generating a concise summary of a longer text.
  • Information Extraction: Extracting structured information from unstructured text.

NLP Example

For more information on NLP, you can read about Advanced NLP Techniques.