What is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI) and linguistics that focuses on the interaction between computers and human (natural) languages. The goal of NLP is to enable machines to read, understand, interpret, and generate human language in a way that is both meaningful and useful.
Key Components of NLP
- Text Preprocessing
- Tokenization: Breaking down text into smaller units like words or sentences.
- Stop-word Removal: Eliminating common but insignificant words (e.g., “and”, “the”).
- Stemming/Lemmatization: Reducing words to their root forms.
- Syntax and Structure
- Part-of-Speech (POS) Tagging: Identifying words as nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.
- Parsing: Analyzing sentence structure using grammatical rules.
- Semantics and Meaning
- Named Entity Recognition (NER): Identifying entities like names, dates, and locations.
- Word Sense Disambiguation: Determining the correct meaning of a word in context.
- Sentiment Analysis: Detecting emotions or opinions in text (positive, negative, neutral).
- Context and Intent
- Topic Modeling: Identifying abstract topics in a collection of documents.
- Intent Detection: Understanding the user’s purpose behind a text or query.
- Coreference Resolution: Determining what pronouns and phrases refer to in context.