Category: Natural Language Processing

For many people, the first interaction with NLP is with virtual assistants. Even while the technology is far from perfect, it still is quite useful—especially for answering questions or getting information, say about a nearby restaurant. But NLP is also having a major impact in the business world. In the years ahead, the technology will…

In 1947, Boris Katz was born in Moldova, which was part of the Soviet Union. He would go on to graduate from Moscow State University, where he learned about computers, and then left the country to the United States (with the assistance of Senator Edward Kennedy). He wasted little time with the opportunity. Besides writing…

There is often confusion between the differences between virtual assistants and chatbots. Keep in mind that there is much overlap between the two. Both use NLP to interpret language and perform tasks. But there are still critical distinctions. For the most part, chatbots are focused primarily for businesses, such as for customer support or sales functions. Virtual…

NLP-driven technologies like virtual assistants, chatbots, and smart speakers are poised to have powerful business models—and may even disrupt markets like e-commerce and marketing. We have already seen an early version of this with Tencent’s WeChat franchise. The company, which was founded during the heyday of the Internet boom in the late 1990s, started with a…

For the most part, we have gone through the main parts of the NLP workflow. Next, let’s take a look at the powerful applications of this technology. Use Case: Improving Sales Roy Raanani, who has a career in working with tech startups, thought that the countless conversions that occur every day in business are mostly…

Now as we saw in Chapter 1, NLP was an early focus for AI researchers. But because of the limited computer power, the capabilities were quite weak. The goal was to create rules to interpret words and sentences—which turned out to be complex and not very scalable. In a way, NLP in the early years was…

As we saw in Chapter 1, language is the key to the Turing Test, which is meant to validate AI. Language is also something that sets us apart from animals. But this area of study is exceedingly complex. Here are just some of the challenges with NLP: Despite all this, there have been great strides with NLP,…