Natural language processing (NLP)

A language that has developed and evolved naturally, through use by human beings, as opposed to an invented or constructed language, as a computer programming language (often used attributively): Natural language is characterized by ambiguity that artificial intelligence struggles to interpret.

The main benefit of NLP is that it improves the way humans and computers communicate with each other. The most direct way to manipulate a computer is through code -- the computer's language. By enabling computers to understand human language, interacting with computers becomes much more intuitive for humans.

Human language is filled with ambiguities that make it incredibly difficult to write software that accurately determines the intended meaning of text or voice data. Homonyms, homophones, sarcasm, idioms, metaphors, grammar and usage exceptions, variations in sentence structure—these just a few of the irregularities of human language that take humans years to learn, but that programmers must teach natural language-driven applications to recognize and understand accurately from the start, if those applications are going to be useful.

Several NLP tasks break down human text and voice data in ways that help the computer make sense of what it's ingesting. Some of these tasks include the following:

• Speech recognition, also called speech-to-text, is the task of reliably converting voice data into text data. Speech recognition is required for any application that follows voice commands or answers spoken questions. What makes speech recognition especially challenging is the way people talk—quickly, slurring words together, with varying emphasis and intonation, in different accents, and often using incorrect grammar.
• Part of speech tagging, also called grammatical tagging, is the process of determining the part of speech of a particular word or piece of text based on its use and context. Part of speech identifies ‘make’ as a verb in ‘I can make a paper plane,’ and as a noun in ‘What make of car do you own?’
• Word sense disambiguation is the selection of the meaning of a word with multiple meanings  through a process of semantic analysis that determine the word that makes the most sense in the given context. For example, word sense disambiguation helps distinguish the meaning of the verb 'make' in ‘make the grade’ (achieve) vs. ‘make a bet’ (place).
• Named entity recognition, or NEM, identifies words or phrases as useful entities. NEM identifies ‘Kentucky’ as a location or ‘Fred’ as a man's name.
• Co-reference resolution is the task of identifying if and when two words refer to the same entity. The most common example is determining the person or object to which a certain pronoun refers (e.g., ‘she’ = ‘Mary’),  but it can also involve identifying a metaphor or an idiom in the text  (e.g., an instance in which 'bear' isn't an animal but a large hairy person).
• Sentiment analysis attempts to extract subjective qualities—attitudes, emotions, sarcasm, confusion, suspicion—from text.