Introduction
Natural language processing is one of the hottest topics in the field of data science. Companies are investing a lot of money in research in this field. Everyone is trying to understand natural language processing and its applications to make a career around it. Every business wants to integrate it into their business in some way.
You know why?
Because only in a few years, natural language processing has become so powerful and shocking, that no one could have imagined. To understand the power of natural language processing and its impact on our lives, we must take a look at their applications. Therefore, I have compiled a list of the 10 main applications of natural language processing.
Then, let's start with the first application of natural language processing.
Note: If you are new to NLP, check our Online NLP Training
AutoCorrect and AutoComplete Search
Whenever I search for something on Google, after writing 2-3 letters, will show you the possible search terms. O, if you are looking for something with typos, fixes them and still finds relevant results for you. Isn't it amazing?
It is something that everyone wears on a daily basis but never pays much attention to it.. It is a wonderful application of natural language processing and a great example of how it is affecting millions of people around the world., including you and me. Search autocomplete and auto-correct feature helps us find accurate results very efficiently. Now, several other companies have also started using this feature on their websites, like Facebook and Quora.
The engine that powers search-autocomplete and autocorrect are language models. You can read more about language models in this article: A complete guide to building your own language model in Python!!
Language translator
Have you ever used Google Translate to find out what a particular word or phrase is in a different language? I'm sure it's a YES!! and the ease with which it translates a piece of text from one language to another is quite amazing, truth? The technique behind this is machine translation.
Automatic translation is the procedure of automatically converting text from one language to another, keeping the meaning intact.
In the first days, machine translation systems were based on dictionaries and rules, and they had very limited success. But nevertheless, due to developments in the field of neural networks, the availability of huge data and powerful machines, machine translation has become quite accurate to convert text from one language to another.
Today, tools like Google Translate can easily convert text from one language to another. These tools are helping numerous individuals and businesses break the language barrier and be successful.. Do you want to know the technique used in Google Translate? Then here is a must-read article for you..
Social media monitoring
More and more people these days have started using social media to post their thoughts on a product., particular policy or issue. These can contain useful information about a person's likes and dislikes.. Therefore, analyzing this unstructured data can help generate valuable information. Natural language processing also comes to the rescue here.
Today, companies use various NLP techniques to analyze social media posts and find out what customers think about their products. Businesses are also using social media monitoring to understand the issues and problems their customers face when using their products.. Not just companies, even the government uses it to identify possible threats related to the security of the nation.
If you are also excited about taking advantage of natural language processing to monitor social media, here are some articles to start your journey:
Chatbots
Customer service and experience are the most important thing for any company. It can help companies improve their products and also keep customers satisfied. But interacting with each customer manually and solving problems can be a tedious task.. This is where chatbots come into the picture. Chatbots help businesses achieve the goal of a seamless customer experience.
Today, many companies use chatbots for their apps and websites, what solves basic customer queries. It not only makes the process easier for companies, It also saves customers the frustration of waiting to interact with phone support.
What's more, can reduce the cost of hiring call center representatives for the business. Initially, chatbots were only used as a tool that solved customer inquiries, but today they have become a personal companion. From recommending a product to getting customer feedback, chatbots can do everything.
Then, We show you how you can create a chatbot yourself:
Survey analysis
Surveys are an important way to evaluate a company's performance. Companies conduct many surveys to get customer feedback on various products. This can be very useful in understanding failures and helping companies improve their products..
But nevertheless, the problem arises when many customers take the survey, resulting in an increase in data size. It becomes impossible for one person to read them all and draw a conclusion. This is where companies use natural language processing to analyze surveys and generate information from them., how to know users' feelings about an event from comments and analyze product reviews to understand the pros and cons. Today, most companies use these methods because they provide much more accurate and useful information.
If you want to know how you can do this, then you can read my article in which I have analyzed the reviews of products created by Amazon: A Beginner's Guide to Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) about text data (Amazon case study)
Targeted advertising
One day I was looking for a mobile phone on Amazon and, a few minutes later, Google started showing me similar mobile phone related ads on various web pages. I'm sure you've experienced it.
Do you know what happened here?
Targeted advertising !!
Yes! You read it right targeted advertising. Targeted advertising is a type of online advertising in which ads are shown to the user based on their online activity. Nowadays, most online businesses use this approach because, first, saves businesses a lot of money and, Secondly, relevant ads are shown only to potential customers.
Targeted advertising works primarily on keyword matching. Ads are associated with a keyword or phrase, and is displayed only to those users who search for the keyword similar to the keyword the ad was associated with. Obviously, that's not enough, there are other factors such as recent websites they visited and web pages they showed interest in, all are taken into account to provide users with relevant advertisements for products they may be interested in. For more information on keyword matching, click on here.
Hiring and recruiting
The Human Resources department is an integral part of every company. They have the most important job of selecting the right employees for a company. But, today, in this highly competitive world, recruiters must review hundreds or, sometimes, thousands of resumes for a single position. It can take hours to filter resumes and shortlist candidates. Can this task be automated?
Yes! With the help of natural language processing, recruiters can find the right candidate very easily. This simply means that the recruiter would not have to go through every resume and manually filter out the right candidates.. The technique, What information extraction with named entity recognition, can be used to extract information such as skills, Name, location and education. Later, these features can be used to represent candidates in feature space, and then they can be classified into the categories of fit or unfit for a particular role. Or they can also be recommended a different role based on their resume.
This allows for unbiased résumé filtering and selection of the best possible candidates for a vacant position without requiring a lot of human work.. Most companies use Application tracking systems to filter resumes efficiently.
Voice assistants
I'm sure you already met them, Google Assistant, Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa, Does it sound to you? Yes, these are all voice assistants.
A voice assistant is software that uses voice recognition, natural language understanding and natural language processing to understand a user's verbal commands and take actions accordingly. Arguably similar to a chatbot, but I have included voice assistants separately because they deserve a better place on this list. They are much more than a chatbot and can do much more than a chatbot can..
Today, most of us can't imagine our lives without voice assistants. Over the years, have become a very reliable and powerful friend. From setting our morning alarm to finding a restaurant for us, a voice assistant can do anything. They have opened a new door of opportunities for both users and companies.
Grammar checkers
This is one of the most used applications of natural language processing. Grammar check tools like Grammarly provide tons of features that help a person write better content. They can turn any ordinary text into beautiful literature. If you want to write an email to your boss or if you are going to write a report or, best, an article, there's no denying the fact that you need these helpful friends.
These tools can correct grammar, spelling, suggest better synonyms and help deliver content with greater clarity and engagement. They also help improve the readability of content and, Thus, allow you to get your message across in the best possible way. If you take a look at the condition of the grammar checkers five years ago, you will find that they were not as capable as they are today.
You know why?
Because transformers came in 2017, and i'm not talking about these.
I mean the transformers that are used in natural language processing. They sound interesting, ¿no? Then you should read this article, that explains everything about transformers: How do transformers work in NLP? A guide to the latest cutting-edge models
Email filtering
Have you ever used Gmail?
I'm sure yes, then you may have already noticed that every time a mail arrives, is classified into the main sections, social and promotions. And the best part is that spam emails are also filtered in a separate section. Isn't it amazing and beneficial at the same time? Yes, it is, and that's all email filtering. And I don't have to tell you how much our daily tasks depend on this feature..
Emails are filtered by text classification, which is a natural language processing technique. And as you may have already guessed. Text classification is the process of classifying text into predefined categories. Another great example of text sorting is sorting news articles into various categories.. Here are some resources to get you started with text classification:
Final notes
Since you are familiar with natural language processing applications, now you can dive into the field of natural language processing. To save you the headache of searching for resources online, I have listed some wonderful courses related to natural language processing.
courses:
If you know of any other great natural language processing apps, share it in the comment section below.
Hope you enjoyed this article. If you found this article informative, Share it with your friends and don't forget to share your feedback and comment below your queries. What's more, comment on the amazing natural language processing apps you think we missed.
