Why Natural Language Processing is the future of Artificial Intelligence?

What is Natural Language Processing(NLP)?

The hottest commodity on the technology market today, NLP is essentially a field of Artificial Intelligence and Linguistics. It is the ability of our beloved computers to read, understand and derive meaning from human languages such as English, Spanish, French, etc. It utilizes Machine Learning models such as Neural Networks, to carry out this complex task!

Users on the internet, be it on blogs or social media websites, generate a huge amount of textual data. This data is literally the plain-spoken ideas and views of various people. It gives us great insight into ongoing trends and helps us develop useful models to predict various things. However, this data happens to be unstructured, and we require a technique to break it down and make it "computer-understandable". In addition to interpreting text/speech based on keywords, we actually require the machines to understand the meaning behind those words, in a humane way. NLP takes on this uphill task to conquer the impossible!

Current Applications of NLP

• Speech Recognition (also to handle multiple accents)
• Language translation as seen in Google Translate, etc.
• Realtime Grammar checking as seen in Grammarly, etc.
• Chatbots as seen in various websites
• Personal Virtual Assistants such as Siri, Cortana, etc.
• Market Intelligence
• Sentiment Analysis on Customer Feedbacks (Used in Amazon, etc.)
• Character Recognition
• Spam Filtering of mails, and so on!

Future Scope

Current NLP applications are already breaking barriers and making people go 'WOW'. Virtual assistants, smart predictions are changing the way we perceive and use technology. However, there is a lot of scope for improvement. Current challenges include dealing with the ideas of irony and sarcasm in text.

There is scope for more accurate and faster text translation to enable people to converse with each other in languages they don't understand! More personalized virtual assistants like Jarvis! More impactful data-driven digital marketing and selling. Audio querying for Q/As and so on.

NLP has changed the way we interact with computers and it’ll continue doing so in the future. These AI technologies will be the underlying force for transformation from data-driven to intelligence-driven endeavors, as they shape and improve communication technology in the years to come.

Cheers!