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