9 Examples of Natural Language Processing

John Spacey, updated on January 13, 2023

Natural language processing is a class of technology that seeks to process, interpret and produce natural languages such as English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi and Spanish. Real world use of natural language doesn't follow a well formed set of rules and exhibits a large number of variations, exceptions and idiosyncratic qualities. As such, natural language processing is often tackled with artificial intelligence techniques designed to automate the learning process. The following are common types of natural language processing.

Optical Character Recognition

Converting written or printed text into data.

Speech Recognition

Converting spoken words into data.

Machine Translation

Translating text from one language to another.

Natural Language Generation

Formatting information as a natural language. For example, a weather system that generates a weather forecast in paragraph form.

Sentiment Analysis

Interpreting basic information from language such as the topic being discussed and whether comments are positive or negative. For example, brand engagement metrics might look at how many people are talking about a brand and how much of that talk is positive.

Semantic Search

Understanding and answering questions posed in a natural language. For example, accurately processing a search query such as "give me the address of that bar I went to last weekend."

Machine Learning

Using natural language to train artificial intelligence. This can be learning related to language itself or another topic such as economics.

Natural Language Programming

Tools that allow end users to create or customize computer programs with natural language. For example "make me an app that suggests new careers paths to me based on people with similar skills and experiences who have successfully improved their salary and quality of life with a new career."

Affective Computing

Affective computing is the machine equivalent of emotional intelligence. Allows user interfaces to understand human ideas and emotional states and to take on human-like conversations.

Overview: Natural Language Processing
Type	Artificial Intelligence
Definition	A class of technology that seeks to process, interpret and produce natural languages.
Privacy	Natural language processing potentially allows people's conversations, ideas and emotional states to be captured, stored and processed as data. This combined with other technologies such as internet of things could represent a significant privacy issue.
Related Concepts	Natural Language Machine Learning Affective Computing Sentiment Analysis Privacy