What is Natural Language Processing?

What is Natural Language Processing?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a subfield of artificial intelligence that gives machines the ability to read and understand human language. At its core, NLP is about understanding and interpreting the complexity of our natural language. To do this, NLP combines various methods from linguistics and modern computer science.

Why is NLP important?

The majority of data in the digital age is unstructured. This means that the data has an unidentifiable data structure. Unstructured data includes, for example, digital texts and digital audio recordings of human speech. The problematic thing about unstructured data is that it is difficult for computers to process because it does not fit into the traditional row and column structure of a relational database. NLP provides a solution to this very problem. Because NLP enables computers to process unstructured data, extract information and make it usable.

Where does NLP find application?

With digitalization, NLP has become increasingly relevant and has crept further and further into our everyday lives, so that we come into contact with NLP almost every day. So there are numerous examples of application areas for NLP. One example is the use of NLP in spam detection for emails. Email providers like Gmail or Yahoo analyze and classify incoming emails with the help of NLP and thus prevent spam emails from ending up in the inbox. Other examples of the use of NLP are translators such as Google Translator or voice assistants such as Alexa or Siri.

At claimflow, we use NLP to automatically classify documents and extract information, among other things. This enables us to automatically read invoices down to individual items.

Sources: Towards Data Science (translated) and Bots and People