Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the field in computer science where we teach computers to understand human language.

Computers communicate with numbers, so if we want them to understand how we communicate we need to understand how language actually works and how people determine meaning.

People use a lot of emotion when they interact with each other, and determining if somebody feels positively or negatively about whatever they're talking about may seem simple for us, but for computers it's much more complex. Furthermore, humans are big fans of sarcasm, slang, and improper grammar, making the process of teaching our technology to understand what we mean even more difficult.

This process, of figuring out what people mean when they talk or write and inputting it in such a way that computers can understand and respond to, is called Sentiment Analysis. We can determine the emotion people try to convey in language by using different algorithms that analyze each word, propose potential meaning, and decide which meaning is most probable. People do this automatically, but for computers it can take a lot more time. So why do we even do it?

Computers are capable of analyzing huge amounts of data, all at the same time, which humans just can't do. By helping computers understand what we mean, they can process billions of words. This has a lot of potential: NLP and Sentiment Analysis is already used in thousands of homes with voice-activated assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Apple's Siri, but it can also be used to learn more about humans. With the ability to understand the words of millions of people on the internet, we can learn about the current state of our world and what people think about it. In the future, we may even be able to improve the world using this information.