Natural Language

Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data.

Or to put it simply: Natural language processing makes it possible for humans to talk to machines.

5 Amazing examples of Natural Language Processing

Excellent article and tutorial site (comprehensive)

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/artificial_intelligence/artificial_intelligence_natural_language_processing.htm

Suggested Video

Free curriculum for learning Natural Language Processing

(For those wanted to begin a startup company, consult or get a job in this area. Prerequisite: basic python programming and basic algebra and probability)

Beginnings and History

Natural language processing has its roots in the 1950s. Already in 1950, Alan Turing published an article titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" which proposed what is now called the Turing test as a criterion of intelligence, a task that involves the automated interpretation and generation of natural language, but at the time not articulated as a problem separate from artificial intelligence.

Why it is important

Human language is astoundingly complex and diverse. We express ourselves in infinite ways, both verbally and in writing. Not only are there hundreds of languages and dialects, but within each language is a unique set of grammar and syntax rules, terms and slang. When we write, we often misspell or abbreviate words, or omit punctuation. When we speak, we have regional accents, and we mumble, stutter and borrow terms from other languages. 

While supervised and unsupervised learning, and specifically deep learning, are now widely used for modeling human language, there’s also a need for syntactic and semantic understanding and domain expertise that are not necessarily present in these machine learning approaches. NLP is important because it helps resolve ambiguity in language and adds useful numeric structure to the data for many downstream applications, such as speech recognition or text analytics. 

Source: https://www.sas.com/en_gb/insights/analytics/what-is-natural-language-processing-nlp.html