Definition
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field of AI that enables computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language. It combines linguistics, computer science, and machine learning.
Purpose
The purpose is to bridge human language and machine understanding. NLP is used in chatbots, translation, search, and sentiment analysis.
Importance
- Core to modern AI systems.
- Enables interaction between humans and computers.
- Risks include bias and hallucinations in outputs.
- Requires large datasets for training.
How It Works
- Collect and preprocess text data.
- Tokenize text into units (words or subwords).
- Apply models (rule-based, statistical, or neural).
- Train on labeled or unlabeled data.
- Generate predictions or language outputs.
Examples (Real World)
- Google Translate: NLP for multilingual translation.
- Grammarly: NLP for grammar correction.
- Alexa: NLP for interpreting voice commands.
References / Further Reading
- Jurafsky & Martin. Speech and Language Processing. Stanford.
- Manning & Schütze. Foundations of Statistical NLP. MIT Press.
- Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).