Natural Language Processing Basics

Teaching AI to understand language.

What is NLP?

Natural Language Processing = AI understanding human language.

Like teaching computers to read and understand English!

Common NLP Tasks

Sentiment Analysis: Is text positive or negative?

• "Great product!" = Positive
• "Terrible service" = Negative

Translation: Convert between languages

• English to Spanish
• Japanese to English

Chatbots: Answer questions

• Customer service bots
• Siri, Alexa

Text Summarization: Make text shorter

• Summary of long article
• TLDR generator

Real-World Examples

Gmail: Smart Reply suggestions
Grammarly: Grammar correction
Siri/Alexa: Voice commands
Google Translate: Language translation
Spam Filters: Detect spam emails

How NLP Works

1. Clean text: Remove extra spaces, punctuation
2. Tokenize: Split into words
3. Understand meaning: AI analyzes
4. Generate output: Response or action

Example

Analyzing customer review:

Input: "The hotel in Miami was amazing! Great service."

NLP Process:

• Detects positive words: "amazing", "great"
• Sentiment: Positive
• Topic: Hotel service

Output: Positive review about service

Challenges

• Sarcasm: "Oh great, another delay" (negative, not positive!)
• Context: "Bank" (river bank or money bank?)
• Slang: "That's lit!" (good)

Getting Started

Try ChatGPT or similar tools to see NLP in action!

Remember

• NLP = AI understanding text
• Used in chatbots, translation
• Powers voice assistants