Natural language processing (NLP) is the ability of a computer program to understand human language as it is spoken. As a component of artificial intelligence (AI), it also falls into the linguistics field. A cousin to NLP is neural machine translation (MT) and the differences between the two can get a little fuzzy. This information came to our attention from Slator in their article, “Investors Shovel Millions into Natural Language Processing.”
Interest in NLP began in 1950 when Alan Turing asserted that a computer could be considered intelligent if it could carry on a conversation with a human being without the human realizing they were talking to a machine. Fast forward 67 years and it is clear that NLP involves a lot more than a computer recognizing a list of words.
Context matters. A combination of AI and a solid common sense ontology can help identify relationships and put unstructured data in the proper context. The reason that a learning system is necessary is because the integrity of data is not always up to par.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.
