Natural Language Processing

You say “play something nice” and music starts. No button was pressed and no command was typed. A machine took ordinary human words and worked out what to do with them.

1What the domain is

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

NLP is the branch of AI that deals with the interaction between computers and humans using natural language. Its ultimate objective is to read, decipher, understand and make sense of human languages in a valuable way.

What “natural language” means

A natural language is a language spoken and written by people — Hindi, English, Bengali, Tamil. It is the opposite of a computer language like Python, which was designed to be unambiguous. Natural languages were not designed at all, which is exactly why they are hard for a machine.

Three domains, three kinds of data

Pick a domain and it rises. What is standing on the pedestal is the data that domain is fed. Drag sideways to turn.

Natural Language Processing is fed words — written and spoken.

Deals with the interaction between computers and humans using natural language: the machine reads or hears human words and makes sense of them.

Examples: Email spam filters · Google Translate · Voice assistants, auto captions

2Examples CBSE uses

Email filters

One of the earliest uses of NLP. It began with spam filters that looked for particular words and phrases that signal a spam message, and decided which messages to keep out of your inbox.

Machine translation

Google Translate and Microsoft Translator analyse the structure and meaning of a sentence in one language and produce the equivalent sentence in another.

Also NLP: voice assistants, automatic captions on a video, chatbots, sentiment analysis of reviews, and picking the keywords out of a paragraph.

Why words are harder than numbers

“The bat flew away” and “the bat broke” share a word that means two different things, and only the rest of the sentence decides which. A number never does that. This is why language needs a whole domain to itself.

3From the board papers

What is the primary focus of NLP?
(A) Analysing computer languages (B) Interacting between computers and humans using artificial language (C) Dealing with the interaction between computers and humans using natural language (D) Enhancing human-to-human communicationCBSE AI Class X textbook, Unit 1

1 mark

▶Show the answer

(C). Note the trap in (B): it says artificial language. NLP is about natural language — the language people actually speak.

4Check yourself

Quick Check

A system reads thousands of customer reviews and reports whether they are happy or angry. Which domain?

Quick Check

Which of these is NOT a natural language?

← Previous

👁️ Computer Vision

Which Domain Is This? 🔍