What Is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?
NLP enables computers to understand human language. It's the technology behind voice assistants, sentiment analysis, and AI chatbots like AskBiz.
Key Takeaways
- NLP enables computers to read, understand, and generate human language.
- Business applications include sentiment analysis, chatbots, document processing, and search.
- LLMs are the most advanced form of NLP — able to understand and generate nuanced language.
What NLP is
Natural Language Processing is the branch of AI focused on enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language — as written text or spoken words. It powers the ability to ask a question in plain English and receive a relevant, intelligible answer — a fundamental shift from the earlier paradigm of needing to learn specific query syntax or interface design to extract information from systems.
Core NLP tasks
Sentiment analysis: determining whether text expresses positive, negative, or neutral sentiment. Named entity recognition: identifying people, places, companies, and products in text. Text classification: categorising documents by topic or type. Machine translation: converting text between languages. Summarisation: condensing long documents into key points. Question answering: responding to natural language queries with relevant information.
Business applications
Customer review analysis: automatically categorising and scoring thousands of customer reviews to identify common themes and sentiment patterns. Customer support: chatbots that handle routine enquiries in natural language. Contract and document processing: extracting key terms, dates, and obligations from legal documents. Voice assistants: understanding spoken queries and commands. Search: returning relevant results for natural language queries rather than keyword matches.
NLP and AskBiz
AskBiz's interface is built on NLP — specifically on large language models that enable you to ask questions about your business in plain English. 'What were my top three products last month by margin?' 'Which customers haven't bought in 90 days?' 'How does my CAC compare to last quarter?' Each of these is processed by NLP, translated into a data query, and answered in natural language.