The human mind and Artificial Intelligence are still learning to coexist, with the full potential and harmony of this exciting symbiosis and ubiquitous connectivity yet to be unfolded. Though AI is arguably still in its nascent stages, this technology has been permeating our lives for quite some time. Natural Language Processing, or NLP technology, is one of the most exciting components of AI and has been improving our online experience to an extent that most of us aren’t entirely aware of.
When we use Google Translate, Search Autocomplete, email filters, smart assistants, and numerous similar applications, we are actually harvesting the power of Natural Language Processing solutions.What is Natural Language Processing & How Does It Work?
One of the critical (and quite challenging) steps toward the aforementioned symbiosis is AI’s ability to listen, speak, write, and ultimately understand human language, and – perhaps most importantly – the main intent behind it. Natural Language Processing, though still evolving, is a form of AI that utilizes a subfield of linguistics and computational processes to make the interaction between software and human language as seamless as possible, with little to no chunks of meaning getting lost during the procedure. The end result involves computers being capable of processing and analyzing large amounts of natural language data, and in so doing “understand” the content of the information being conveyed, including the wide spectrum of contextual nuances involved and the intent hidden within the structure of the human language. This enables Natural Language Processing solutions to extrapolate accurate information and glean actionable insights, as well as categorize and manage granular data. One great use case example that we all utilize daily is an email spam filter. Platforms like Gmail use NLP technology to recognize, classify and filter your emails by analyzing the text and the contexts within the emails flowing through their servers in order to prevent spam messages from reaching your main inbox and ruining your day. This brings us to:Typical Applications of Natural Language Processing Solutions
Natural Language Processing algorithms and Machine Learning technologies have been successfully applied across multiple industries, wherein these solutions act as major catalysts for streamlining various convoluted and time-consuming processes. The industries that have evolved the most during recent years due to the use of NLP include:- Healthcare (Electronic Medical Records systems)
- Pharmaceuticals (reading safety-relevant data within the unstructured text)
- Finance/Legal, FinTech, insurance (structured data analysis, chatbots, document processing, etc)
- Digital marketing and IT (raw data and KPI analyses, ad targeting, market insights, eCommerce, chatbots, UX, voice search, etc)
- E-Governance
- Education
Customer Service & User Experience
NLP has changed the game when it comes to UX and customer service. Not only does it improve a user’s online and offline journey via chatbots, predictive search, smart navigation, etc, it also automates these components from the service provider standpoint and renders operations much more streamlined and cost-efficient.E-commerce and Sales Support
The global-scale events of 2020 created an evident boom in online shopping, which probably wouldn’t have been entirely possible without the use of NLP. Natural Language Processing enables machines to analyze user behavior when a visitor searches and purchases products/services, thus providing valuable insight to service providers on how their audience is interacting with their systems. This type of interaction allows eCommerce businesses to create an improved customer journey for their users, while at the same time improving their own strategies and boosting leads/sales.Reputation Management & Market Intelligence
ORM is an integral part of a brand’s online presence, as customer reviews can literally make or break a business or a career. NLP automates and improves this process through the use of content, keyword, sentiment, and context analysis of both structured and unstructured data. It can also help with market scanning with much more granular and cost-effective competitor research.Text Platforms
Don’t tell my employees this, but a great deal of the sentences you are reading within this article have been auto-finished by Google Docs. Jokes aside, Natural Language Processing solutions are dramatically transforming our everyday communication via grammar and spell checkers like Grammarly, translation platforms like Google Translate, text improvement tools like InstaText, or the predictive text component present in most virtual keyboards our smartphones use.Voice Automated Solutions & Smart Mobile Devices
NLP technology has made real-time interaction between humans and machines a reality, not just a far-fetched element used in sci-fi movies. It makes voice automated systems like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant possible by helping them decipher and process spoken language to improve both our workflows and everyday life experiences.Digital Marketing
Natural Language Processing applications are deeply embedded in data-gathering and analysis-based operations present within the modern marketing landscape. They are used for improving ad targeting, gaining valuable market insights, improving digital presence, and other similar processes that drive this industry forward.Employee Satisfaction
Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning play a huge role in improving workflows, removing bottlenecks, and obviating the need for manual tasks within business operations, including task automation and survey analytics. For example, HTEC has helped many clients like Great Place to Work and Quinyx utilize NLP to improve their management and build high-trust workplace environments, as well as drive success through employee motivation.HTEC EXPERIENCE – Making sense out of textual data
The most common and basic problem in NLP is understanding the semantics behind the content. Given a document, a paragraph, a comment – what does it mean, what does it refer to, and which topics does it cover? Extracting the meaning from a text is a powerful tool for understanding the behavior of those behind it and the author’s intents and interests, as well as for building a context around the users and predicting their future choices. But …How to catch the meaning?
Before answering that question, another one needs to be answered first, namely: How to define the meaning? Text is made of words, and the way the human mind works is by carefully choosing which words to use to describe a particular phenomenon, combining specific words into phrases for specific topics, placing them into a particular order to make a point, and doing all that based on experience. The words, the phrases, and the order define the meaning. Extracting the words and phrases, and understanding their relations, is how meaning can be inferred. Sounds simple, as it’s exactly how our minds work, but how to mimic human reasoning?Starting simple with statistics
The simplest method of extracting the meaning from a text is statistics-based. The final goal behind it is to create a representation of the text with the most important words and phrases describing it. Two challenges can be identified: the first is to extract the words and phrases, and the second is to score their importance. This class of statistics-based methods relies on word counting while neglecting the order and mutual relation of the words, except when finding phrases. A text is modeled as a bag of words – a set of unrelated entities in the same group/bag. One of the most popular counting techniques is the tf-idf method. Each word in a document is given a tf-idf score which is a product of two quantities – tf and idf:- Term frequency (tf) – number of occurrences of the word in a single document,
- Inverse document frequency (idf) – how frequent is the word in (some) corpus of documents. This is a measure of the specificity of the word for the entire corpus.
Being more insightful with semantics
Semantics-based models take into account the relations between words in a text in different contexts. They are trained on a large amount of mostly unlabeled, textual data, and are known as self-supervised models. Unlike statistical approaches, these models don’t work in the original word space, but transform human-understandable words into machine-understandable numbers, moving them into high-dimensional vector space. One of the first, and probably the most well-known model, is word2vec, which projects each word into a numerical vector. Based on the word’s neighborhood, the position of the corresponding vector is determined to preserve and reflect the semantics of the word by preserving the original context.

Now that we know the meaning, how should we use it?
One of the recent problems our team has been working on concerns federated search – a technique of searching multiple data sources at once. Given a search term (query), the search engine should return a single list of ranked results from all the sources available. Numerous challenges arise from this scenario:- Performance-related – How long will the search take when the number of sources increases significantly?
- Quality-related – How to guarantee the most relevant content is on top of the results list?
- Engagement-related – How to not produce too much content?
- Speedup and cost reduction – not all sources need to be searched, only those with high relevance;
- Improved ranking – relevance scores could be used to rank results coming from more relevant sources higher.
- Machine learning dataset – a subset of 31,000+ arxiv articles on ML subject, from Kaggle
- News dataset – a set of 143,000 articles from 15 American publishers covering the period from 2014 to 2016, also from Kaggle
- Medical dataset – a subset of around 5,000 PubMed abstracts from Kaggle





