In our knowledge of technology, there are many voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, or may be Google Assistant which help you or even me in our daily life. They work on a simple thing called Natural Language Processing (NLP), which is used to help these assistants to understand and give responses to human speech, it is a part of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Our language uses the same words for different meanings like the word “arms”, one meaning of arms is the ammunition, and the other is an upper limb in the human body.
Here We will understand what NLP is. How to set up this NLP? and What are its key measures?
What is NLP?
NLP is also know as Natural Language Processing is like a basic translator that tries to translate the Human language into some kind of format that a computer can understand. It allows local machines to read, understand, and give respond to what we say. It is a mixture of Knowledge of computer science, language studies, and the one and only machine learning as it analyzes the words and the whole sentence.
How NLP Works: Step-by-Step Process
NLP helps a local machine to understand and work with humans. Let’s follow some of the simple steps:
Step 1: Cleaning the Text (Preprocessing)
As we know human language has some messy, extra words moreover basic mistakes on punctuations and all.
To clean the text it do some of the following steps:
- Removing Extra Words: There are some words that are not very important in the sentence hence they are removed
- Splitting the sentences: As we do in coding “I love coding” becomes [“I”, “love”, “coding”]. This is called Tokenization.
- Simplifying words: Some of the words which are in the tenses like past, future or even continuous will be changed to its simple form. This is called Stemming and Lemmatization.
Step 2: Turning Words into Numbers
As you know a local Machine can’t understand Human Language, So it turns them into numerical numbers:
- Counting Words: It Counts how many a particular word comes, In a sentence the word food comes 5 times so it will consider [food:5].
- Finding Similar Words: It tries to find similar words just as “King” and “Queen”.
Step 3: Understanding the Meaning
After the second step, it tries to understand what does that words mean:
- Finding Important Words: NLP can remember some particular data like the names of people, places, or brands.
- Checking Feelings: NLP can tell if the sentence uses any kind of emotions or something like “I love this movie”, NLP Knows that the sentence is happy.
Step 4: Learning to Give Better Answers
After NLP understands text, machine learning helps it improve:
- Basic NLP: Follows simple rules, like checking for certain words.
- Advanced NLP: Learns from lots of text and gives more human-like answers.
Moreover there are some example:
- “What’s the weather like?”
- “Can you tell me today’s forecast?”
- “Is it going to rain?”
How NLP Helps Us Every Day: Real-Life Application
This is used in our daily life, it helps computers to understand thus give responses to what you are saying to them:
- Chatbots & Voice Assistants: Google Assistant, Siri, Gemini, and ChatGPT are the most commonly used chatbots and voice assistants used in our daily life.
- Search Engines: Google, Bing, and Yahoo are the commonly used search engines that use NLP to understand what the user means.
- Social Media: Instagram, Facebook, and X NLP help these platforms to remove the bad content and to stop hate speech.
There are many more Real-Life Applications, we use in our daily life.
Setting up NLP
Step 1: Install Python:
You can install Python from its official website – Python’s website. Furthermore, Just make sure to check the box that says “Add Python to Path”.
Also, you can Download Python and some of its libraries as well. How to use Python and its libraries for data automation
Step 2: Install NLP Libraries:
After the installation of Python, you need to open the command prompt (Windows) or terminal (Mac/Linux) to install some important libraries:
Step 3: Download NLP Models:
In the Visual Studios Code, open the terminal and write the commands:
Summary
NLP helps computers understand and respond to human language. It cleans text by removing extra words and breaking sentences into small part, since computers only understand numbers, however, NLP changes words into numbers as well for better understanding the occurrence of the words in a sentence. We use NLP in chatbots, search engines, spam filters, and healthcare to make technology more helpful in daily life
