Introduction to natural language processing

NLP is based on 50 years of rich research into linguistics and processing algorithms. It is a branch of computer science or artificial intelligence (AI) that uses computer algorithms to analyze, understand, and generate human language data. The algorithms process human language to “understand” its full meaning. NLP has a wide range of applications that include the following:

• Text mining: Extracting information from large amounts of text data, such as documents, emails, and social media posts.
• Information retrieval: Searching for relevant information in large text databases. In this book, you will learn many techniques for information retrieval.
• Question answering: Answering questions posed in natural language.
• Machine translation: Translating text from one language to another.
• Sentiment analysis: Identifying the tone and emotion of text data.
• Natural language generation (NLG): Generating text that mimics human language.

As I said before, NLP has a long development history. Let’s look into it briefly.