If we pay a little more attention around us, we can realize that, daily, we make use of various Artificial Intelligence solutions.

Whether you’re searching On Google or searching for a route in GPS, we use technology. The fact is that this result is only possible thanks to Natural Language Processing (NLP). Without the set of techniques related to it, our interaction with electronic devices would be much less intuitive—which would cause us a number of disorders.

Would you like to learn a little more about Natural Language Processing? So continue reading and discover its main uses and benefits!

Natural Language Processing Concept (NLP)

When a person decides to do a Google search, they need to enter a term. By making use of it, the search engine is able to filter, in seconds, a series of relevant results.

The big question is: how the search engine is able to understand the term we type and, through it, find a number of useful results. Natural Language Processing is the tool that makes this result possible.

In a summarized way, we can describe NLP as a set of techniques that aims to enable communication between people and Artificial Intelligence, allowing AI to understand our language and be able to act accordingly.

Application of technology

It is not difficult to realize that the task of translating our language into software is not simple. After all, the same word can have several meanings depending on the tone used by the communicator. In addition, accents and mispronunciations, and spelling make it even more difficult for an AI to understand our communication.

The software responsible for processing natural language needs to be able to interpret the processing levels common to each language, such as phonological, morphological, and lexical. To succeed in this task, the system uses certain approaches to filter the meaning of each word. Among them, we can mention the statistical approach, the symbolic, the hybrid, and the connectionist.

Example of application of technology

Perhaps, at first glance, this concept appears to be very complex. By way of a simple example, however, the applications of technology tend to become much clearer.

Let’s say a publisher wants to focus the activity of its customer service team on sales. But it has been struggling in this task thanks to the huge volume of calls it receives every day from people interested in receiving simple information, with no great interest in closing a purchase.

In this context, the publisher in question can hire an AI solution and entrust it with the first customer service. AI, in turn, is able to guide the customer about simpler information, such as the books that the publisher has in its catalogue, its distribution policy, and even the procedure necessary for sending originals.

It is interesting to note that Artificial Intelligence can also help in solving simple problems, explaining, for example, the average delivery time of a batch shipped, or pointing out how the customer can track the shipment.

In this way, AI only needs to transfer the call to the service team when the resolution of a problem is too complex, or when the customer is searching for the final information before closing a purchase.

For AI to succeed in these tasks, however, it needs to be able to understand and interpret the words, spoken by the client in the link. This in various scenarios, after all, the tone of voice and the organization of words tends to vary according to the person and the region from which they are calling.

For this reason, Natural Language Processing is so important, because it is precisely great responsible for the ability of Artificial Intelligence to understand human language, which allows it to respond to it in a useful way.

Main functions of NLP

By being able to interpret our language, AI can perform various functions. Continue reading and discover some features it can present.

Information retrieval

Through the knowledge of synonyms, and using the so-called reduction of ambiguity, the software can interpret information presented by the user and search for similar results. This concept is widely used by search engines like  Google.

Q&A

More advanced than the concept of information retrieval, the purpose of preparing questions and answers is intended to deliver, to the user, the answer to a particular question asked by him or excerpts of texts in which the answer to the question in question is present.

Speech recognition

Another function that software can play through Natural Language Processing is speech recognition. This attribution can be described as the ability to interpret the words of a video and turn them into text. This is the case of the process used by Youtube in its automatic subtitles.

Translation

The translation function, in turn, aims to interpret the language in a given language and translate the words, spoken or typed, into another language. This in a way that the translation has the most faithful meaning possible to the words of the original text.

NLP increases the efficiency of Artificial Intelligence because it allows it to understand our language and thus interact with us. This functionality makes room for a number of advances in the corporate world. Areas such as information analysis and customer service, for example, tend to benefit greatly from it.