Tech Trends in Practice

TREND 10Natural Language Processing

The One-Sentence Definition

Natural language processing (or NLP for short) refers to the technology that allows computers to understand human language.

What Is Natural Language Processing?

NLP is used to help computers read, edit, and write text – but it also powers computer “speech,” as seen in voice interfaces and chatbots (see Trend 11).

If you think about it, so much of the world’s information is in the form of natural human language: think of emails, social media posts, text messages, books, spoken conversations, and the like. Traditionally, computers haven’t been great at extracting meaning from language, because language is unstructured data (as opposed to structured data of the sort found in data tables and spreadsheets). But, now, thanks to advancement in artificial intelligence (AI) disciplines like machine learning (see Trend 1), computers are able to process and extract meaning from language to an impressive extent. NLP is a subset of AI, but it also relies on big data (Trend 4), since it takes an awful lot of language data to train NLP models and for them to continually get better over time.

Chances are you’ve already interacted with NLP in one way or another – it’s what allows your Alexa or Siri or Google Assistant to understand your requests. Following on from that, natural language generation, or NLG, is what allows Alexa and friends to respond with human-like speech. NLG (also a subset of AI) takes data and transforms ...