• Question: what is the reason behind natural language processing

    Asked by Robyn Capes-Baldrey to Sreejita, Maja, Daniel on 22 Jan 2020.
    • Photo: Maja Popovic

      Maja Popovic answered on 22 Jan 2020:


      Natural Language Processing is a big field, there are many, many applications.
      To name a few:
      — speech recognition: instead of a person writing down everything that someone is saying, it can be done by a computer;
      — text classification: one can automatically classify texts according to topic, for example if you want only news about sports and you don’t care about other topics, a computer can find those for you
      — machine translation: if you don’t understand some language but you would like to know what is written, a computer can translate it for you. It is not good as human translation, but it is good enough for you to figure out what the text is about
      — if you want to talk to an electronic personal assistant, like Alexa, Siri, etc, this device has to understand what you said
      — you might want to know in which language some text is written, and a computer can do it for you
      — text summarisation: you might want to know only a few important facts from a long text

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