You may not realize it but natural language processing (NLP) is more than an emerging technology for business — it’s a popular technology widely used every day. Online search, spell-check — almost any feature that involves language incorporates natural language processing algorithms.
NLP algorithms teach computers to use language like people. If you were manually searching for information from a set of documents, you’d skim for keywords too, just like search engines. That’s why machine translation, the first form of NLP, was modeled on World War II code breaking techniques. Developers hoped machine translation would translate Russian into English. Results were horrible, but the coders kept at it and a new type of machine learning was born. And because a company can’t grow internationally without translation, NLP was a technology with a business case from the get-go. Today, natural language processing is as integral to the workplace as communication itself.
Read More from This Article: 4 business applications for natural language processing
Source: IT Strategy