Natural Language Processing. What?

This post is intended for the people who are interested in learning something that sounds so simple yet is very challenging when it comes to computers. 

Natural Language Processing or NLP is what this post is going to be about. What it is? Why is it important? Why should I delve into this? Is it interesting? Will I lose hope while doing it? and many questions come in mind when people get introduced to new concepts and technologies. This post is specific to Natural Language Processing and describing what it is.

What it is?

Natural Language Processing or NLP, as the term suggests, is the processing (make the human language in some form so that computer can understand it) of natural language (English, Hindi, Spanish, etc.) to make a connection (not literally) between humans and computers and make computers work just by listening to or reading our commands just because we are on the top of food chain. It is a field of computer science and computational linguistics and can be seen as a subset of a term very popular these days, "artificial intelligence". To understand it in a manner that actually makes sense, let me give you an example. Suppose you speak only English language and you are talking to somebody who knows some other language except English. We all know how tough it is to make them understand what we are saying. Now let us think that we magically became a teacher and taught English to that person to just talk to them. (You might believe that I am obsessed with that person but it's just an example so keep reading). So, we became a teacher and taught English to someone who didn't knew it. We made them understand every word, their meaning, context, connotation, alternatives and much more. Now replace that person with a machine and the concept of natural language processing come into the picture. We will make the machine understand the work we want it to do using some rules that may not precisely translate our command in natural language but with enough precision that the work done is acceptable. This is just one aspect of natural language processing. Some examples that might provide you with the crust are: Google search, Google Now, Apple Siri, Sentiment Analysis, etc. 

For me, NLP is understanding the various patterns in the text that conform with the required application. This can be understanding emotions, common sense, intuition, conscience and what not. Sounds interesting, right? If this post generated some kind of interest in the field please keep reading my future posts answering all the questions in the second paragraph.