Natural Language Processing In Industry

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a set of methods that enable the machine or a computer to understand the human language. Many organizations invest in NLP-driven technologies such as chatbots to address their needs in customer service, virtual assistants, publicity monitoring, issue tracking, etc. Both opportunities and market pressures drive this adoption:

• (opportunity) substantial cost savings due to operational efficiency and scale. For example, chatbots virtual assistants are expected to reduce managers’ workload by 70% by 2024.
• (opportunity) companies don’t always have visibility into the grievances raised on social media and cannot act quickly enough. NLP systems can monitor the social media sites for any grievances raised by customers and triage actionable complaints to the proper internal teams or invoke the chatbot system to interact with the customer and help them resolve the issue.
• (pressure) market demand for speedy, always-available service has increased. NLP agents offer time savings and often enhanced quality of service to consumers at any time of the day.

The main reason for this rising interest is that NLP is finally delivering its promise of understanding human language in context. Among many involved factors, the following two have played a significant role in the popularity of NLP:

• The advent of powerful deep-learning NLP models. The impact of these models have been so revolutionary that experts refer to this category of NLP methods as Natural Language Understanding (NLU)
• Various open-source libraries, affordable cloud services, or commercial products have democratized advanced NLP products.

To this date, most NLP applications were limited to managing customer relations and making financial investments. We are, however, seeing emerging adoption in other industries, such as healthcare, to organize electronic health records and to catalog information in a way that is easily searchable using custom knowledge bases. The NLP applications are vast, and we are just at the beginning of the path.