What is Natural Language Processing?
NLP (Natural Language Processing) is a branch of artificial intelligence that focuses on enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language. Here are the key aspects:
Core Components:
- Syntax Analysis: Understanding grammar and sentence structure
- Semantic Analysis: Interpreting meaning and context
- Pragmatic Analysis: Understanding intent and real-world context
Common Applications:
- Machine Translation (like Google Translate)
- Speech Recognition
- Sentiment Analysis
- Chatbots and Virtual Assistants
- Text Summarization
- Information Extraction
- Question-Answering Systems
Key Techniques:
- Tokenization: Breaking text into words or subwords
- Part-of-Speech Tagging: Identifying nouns, verbs, etc.
- Named Entity Recognition: Identifying names, locations, dates
- Dependency Parsing: Understanding relationships between words
- Word Embeddings: Converting words to numerical vectors
Challenges:
- Ambiguity in language
- Understanding context and idioms
- Handling multiple languages
- Processing informal language and slang
- Dealing with errors in input text
Recent Advances:
- Transformer models like BERT and GPT
- Zero-shot and few-shot learning
- Multilingual models
- Improved context understanding
- Better handling of long-form text
