Shalvi Mahajan - Natural Language Understanding and Inference

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Natural Language Understanding and Influence: Pivotal Parts of Natural Language Processing

Throughout my professional journey as a data scientist at companies like Allianz and Samsung R&D, and currently at SAP in Germany, I have recognized the powerful impact that natural language processing (NLP) can have across various industries in real-time applications.

In today’s article, I am going to delve into two key sub-parts of NLP, namely Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Influence. I am also going to highlight their importance in conversational AI, machine translation, and bi-directional communication.

However, before I do that, let's quickly refresh our understanding of Natural Language Processing.

NLP, or Natural Language Processing, is a process whereby automatic computational analysis is deployed to understand human language. This innovative technology combines rule-based modeling of human language with statistical machine learning and deep learning models, facilitating various tasks such as speech recognition, part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, co-reference resolution, and machine translation to name a few.

Moving towards the core part. What exactly is Natural Language Understanding (NLU)?

NLU is a subset of NLP that uses the syntactic and semantic analysis of text and speech to ascertain the meaning of sentences. In NLP, conversion of text into structured data is performed while NLU focuses on the 'reading aspect' – grasping the intention behind the text. In short, NLU forms the core component of NLP.

What then, is Natural Language Influence?

In the sphere of NLP, Natural Language Influence studies the possibility of whether a hypothesis can be inferred from a premise when both are text sequences.

How NLP Approaches Vary from Basic to Advanced

  • Rule-based NLP: This approach uses regular expressions and is based on specific rules.
  • Statistical or Stochastic NLP: This is an optimization problem that aims to maximize the probability of output, given the input.
  • Deep_learning and neural network methods: This involves recurrent neural networks and LSDM.

Natural Language Understanding in Conversational AI

Conversational AI encompasses technologies such as chatbots and voice assistants – communication mediums that users can interact with. NLU plays a key role in a chatbot conversation by detecting the intent and the sentiment of the user's words, along with the extraction of key entity attributes.

Natural Language Influence & Machine Translation

In machine translation, computational language technology is used to convert one language to another while retaining the original meaning of the input and attempting to generate fluent text in the desired language. The logical relationships between text sequences are determined via natural language inference.

Conclusion

Being an intrinsic part of NLP, Natural Language Understanding, and Influence have a widespread application across industries. They help convert words in the text into vectors or embeddings for further processing and play a significant role in Conversational AI. Furthermore, they help language-agnostic models map sentences from different languages in high dimensional space to gauge their semantic proximity. Understanding these technologies opens up a world of possibilities in the realm of language translation, interpretation, and communication as a whole.

Do reach out if you have more questions or would like to know more on this topic. I am here to help.


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