What is Natural Language Processing

Artificial intelligence provide businesses with novel solutions for a wide variety of problems. AI-powered answers and insights platforms like Attivio help companies draw more relevant and more intelligent insights from their mountains of data by enhancing experiences like enterprise search, customer support, and IT service management (ITSM). Attivio employs natural language processing (NLP) to help users and companies get the most out of these experiences and to make them as user-friendly as possible.

NLP is an AI technology that seeks to simplify the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. Because humans don’t always maintain a rigid attention to language rules like grammar and syntax, NLP seeks to bridge the disconnects between a computer’s extremely literal interpretation of text and a human’s implied meaning. After all, what is the point of implementing AI in your organization if it won’t act as much more than the grammar police?

Natural Language Processing In Practice

The most important use of NLP is, on the surface, a very basic one: To make a computer understand what a human user inputs. NLP is used by Attivio’s platform to parse user queries and content to understand user intent and meaning. To do this, it employs capabilities like speech tagging, lemmatization, synonym expansion, classification, entity extraction, key phrases, and sentiment analysis. (We’ll get to what exactly that all means in the next section.) Through these key features, the Attivio platform can infer meaning from virtually any text a user enters, thereby returning the most relevant results to any query, be it an email lookup of somebody within the organization or a complex question from an end user on your site. Since Attivio unifies an organization’s content across all informational silos, it can return the most correct, most up to date answers every time. NLP can even anticipate questions to more efficiently return answers before you’re done typing.

Natural Language Processing Key Terms

NLP has evolved to the point where even people with the worst shorthand habits can query the system and get meaningful results. Some of these features include:

1. Semantic search uses signals to understand intent and handle ambiguity, recognizing that if a user searches for a specific order they may also want to see the associated vendor account.
2. Autocomplete is less irritating than autocorrect, using extensive activity and data analysis to display relevant and popular search suggestions as users’ type, much like your internet browser does.
3. Spelling correction accounts for spelling errors, returning closest logical alternatives rather than returning an error.
4. Lemmatization uses variations on words such as plurals, tenses, genders, and hyphenated forms to ensure that when you search “profiting”, you’ll also receive results for “profits” or “profited”.
5. Advanced syntax increases search precision by using techniques like phrase search, fielded search, Boolean matching, and proximity.
6. Fuzzy matching helps users find data sources when they only have partial or incorrect information by providing substring and approximate matches.

These complex features of NLP greatly enhance the utility of AI-powered answers and insights platforms. Better yet, Attivio’s NLP recognizes 40+ European, Middle Eastern, and Asian languages, facilitating global installation.

The Final Word

To put it bluntly, NLP makes business-related search experiences better, faster, and more relevant. By bridging the difference between how humans and computers understand language, NLP allows users to communicate naturally and efficiently present the most relevant findings from across information silos so unexpected correlations and insights can be discovered and acted upon.