What is NLP?
NLP stands for natural language processing. It is the field of computer science and artificial intelligence that deals with the communication between a human and a machine. NLP helps machines to interpret the human language and extract the intent, context, and meaning of the message and come up with proper response based on analysis that is similar to a human being. Over a period of training, it can be used to personalize and enhance the user experience.
What is chatbot?
It is a program built using artificial intelligence that responds to the user using text or sound. Chatbots are generally used in customer support, seat reservation, product ordering and making appointments. The famous example of chatbots is Alexa, Siri, Google assistant. Chatbots provide 24×7 assistance to the user. Today almost every company has a chatbot to engage with its users. Find out more about chatbots – read what is a chatbot.
How NLP works?
The first step in NLP is tokenization. Tokenization mean splitting sentences into words. We can just split the words where space occurs. For the example purposes, consider the following sentence “Delhi is the capital of India”. After tokenization, we get a set of words {“Delhi”, “is”, “the”, “capital”, “of”, “India”}
The next step is identifying the parts of speech of each token. For example, “Delhi” and “India” are proper nouns. Thus, the knowledge gained from this step is that Delhi and India are proper nouns so the sentence must be talking about them.
Next step is to identify the stop words. Stop word is nothing but a list of words that frequently occurs in a sentence. So NLP filters out these stop words. In the given above example “is”, “the”, “of” is primarily the stop words. Stop words can be identified by just by checking a hard-coded list of the available stop words.
The following step includes dependency parsing where the NLP determines how all the words are related to each other. Next step is NER (Named Entity Recognition) which detects and label these nouns with the real-world concepts that they represent. For example “Delhi” and “India” represents the location.
These above steps are just a short summary of how NPL extracts information from messages and uses it for further analysis.
You may also want to know more: Artificial Intelligence
Why NLP is required in the chatbot?
The main reason why chatbots are developed is to provide human-like assistance to the user and help him to achieve his/her goal. NLP helps the chatbot to understand the user’s message and respond appropriately. For example, if you send a message “Hi”, it is the NLP that lets the chatbot understand, that the message is a standard greeting. Thus using AI functionality the chatbot will respond with a return greeting.
Many chatbots are of little or no value without NLP. Only with NLP the chatbots understand messages and respond appropriately. The system is powerful enough to make or break a chatbot’s success as well as make it popular. With NLP chatbots can connect to queries and identify entities as well as the sentiments to generate own intelligent responses. Without NLP a chatbot cannot meaningfully understand the context of the message. The message is just a text input for a chatbot. It’s the natural language processing that helps to extract the context and meaning of the message.
NLP empowers bots with personality. It enhances the functions of chatbots for all businesses. It elevates their scripted and sequential conversations of chatbots to that of humans. Assessing, analyzing and communicating skills of NLP based chatbots makes this possible.
Read More: Creating Chatbot with Deep Learning
NLP understands and enables the needs of the customer with better clarity as well as the accuracy. It gains importance in the business world in order to provide better user experience across applications like chatbots, speech recognition, social media listening & texting, voice-enabled applications and devices. NLP with its translational and other features are the need of the hour. NLP based chatbots improve customer experience. You can fulfil the Expectations of today’s millennial business people around the globe with NLP’s business intelligence.
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