The Steps that Help Computer to Understand Human Language

Estimated read time 7 min read
Knowledge Sharing

Introduction

Natural language processing uses Language Processing Pipelines to read, pipelines Pipeline apply the human decipher and understand human languages. These pipelines consist of six prime processes. That breaks the whole voice or text into small chunks, reconstructs it, analyses, and processes it to bring us the most relevant data from the Search Engine Result Page. Here are the Steps that Help Computer to Understand Human Language

Natural Language Processing Pipelines

When you call NLP on a text or voice, it converts the whole data into strings, and then the prime string undergoes multiple steps (the process called processing pipeline.) It uses trained pipelines to supervise your input data and reconstruct the whole string depending on voice tone or sentence length.

 For each pipeline, the component returns to the main string. Then passes on to the next components. The capabilities and efficiencies depend upon the components, their models, and training. NLP encompasses a wide range of tasks and applications, including:

Text Classification: This involves categorizing pieces of text into predefined categories. For example, classifying emails as spam or not spam, or sentiment analysis to determine if a piece of text expresses positive, negative, or neutral sentiment.

Named Entity Recognition (NER): This task involves identifying and classifying named entities in text into predefined categories, such as names of people, organizations, locations, dates, etc.

Machine Translation: This involves automatically translating text from one language to another. Services like Google Translate use NLP techniques.

Information Extraction: This involves extracting specific information or data from unstructured text. For example, extracting names, dates, and locations from news articles.

Question Answering Systems: These systems take a question in natural language and attempt to provide a relevant and accurate answer. Examples include chatbots and virtual assistants like Siri or Alexa.

Summarization: This involves condensing large bodies of text into shorter, coherent summaries while preserving the key information.

Speech Recognition: While not strictly a text-based NLP task, speech recognition involves converting spoken language into written text and is closely related to NLP.

Conversational Agents (Chatbots): These are systems designed to engage in natural language conversations with humans. They find applications in customer support, virtual assistants, and more.

NLP relies on a combination of linguistics, computer science, and machine learning techniques. It often involves the use of machine learning models, particularly deep learning models like recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and transformers, which are highly effective at processing sequential data like language.

The applications of NLP are vast and have a significant impact on various industries including healthcare, finance, customer service, marketing, and more. NLP is a rapidly evolving field with ongoing research to improve the capabilities and applications of language processing systems.

Sentence Segmentation

When you have the paragraph(s) to approach, the best way to proceed is to go with one sentence at a time. It reduces the complexity and simplifies the process, even gets you the most accurate results. Computers never understand language the way humans do, but they can always do a lot if you approach them in the right way. For example, consider the above paragraph. Then, your next step would be breaking the paragraph into single sentences.

When you have the paragraph(s) to approach, the best way to proceed is to go with one sentence at a time.

It reduces the complexity and simplifies the process, even gets you the most accurate results.

Computers never understand language the way humans do, but they can always do a lot if you approach them in the right way.

# Import the nltk library for NLP processes

import nltk

# Variable that stores the whole paragraph

text = "..."

# Tokenize paragraph into sentences

sentences = nltk.sent_tokenize(text)

# Print out sentences

for sentence in sentences:

print(sentence)

When you have paragraph(s) to approach, the best way to proceed is to go with one sentence at a time.

It reduces the complexity and simplifies the process, even gets you the most accurate results.

Computers never understand language the way humans do, but they can always do a lot if you approach them in the right way.

Word Tokenization

Tokenization is the process of breaking a phrase, sentence, paragraph, or entire documents into the smallest unit, such as individual words or terms. And each of these small units is known as tokens.

These tokens could be words, numbers, or punctuation marks. Based on the word’s boundary – ending point of the word. Or the beginning of the next word. It is also the first step for stemming and lemmatization.

This process is crucial because the meaning of the word gets easily interpreted through analysing the words present in the text. Let’s take an example:

That dog is a husky breed

When you tokenize the whole sentence, the answer you get is [‘That’, ‘dog’, ‘is’, a, ‘husky’, ‘breed’]. There are numerous ways you can do this, but we can use this tokenized form to:

  • Count the number of words in the sentence.
  • Measure the frequency of the repeated words.

Output:

['That dog is a husky breed.', 'They are intelligent and independent.']

Parts of Speech Parsing

Parts of speech (POS) tagging is the process of assigning a word in a text as corresponding to a part of speech based on its definition and its relationship with adjacent and related words in a phrase, sentence, or paragraph. POS tagging falls into two distinctive groups: rule based and stochastic. In this paper, a rule-based POS tagger is developed for the English language using Lex and Yacc. The tagger utilizes a small set of simple rules along with a small dictionary to generate sequences of tokens

Output:

[('Everything', 'NN'), ('is', 'VBZ'),

('all', 'DT'),('about', 'IN'),

('money', 'NN'), ('.', '.')]

Lemmatization

English is also one of the languages where we can use various forms of base words. When working on the computer, it can understand that these words are used for the same concepts when there are multiple words in the sentences having the same base words. The process is what we call lemmatization in NLP.

It goes to the root level to find out the base form of all the available words. They have ordinary rules to handle the words, and most of us are unaware of them.

Stop Words

When you finish the lemmatization, the next step is to identify each word in the sentence. English has a lot of filler words that don’t add any meaning but weakens the sentence. It’s always better to omit them because they appear more frequently in the sentence.

Most data scientists remove these words before running into further analysis. The basic algorithms to identify the stop words by checking a list of known stop words as there is no standard rule for stop words.

Output:

Tokenize Texts with Stop Words:

['Oh', 'man',',' 'this', 'is', 'pretty', 'cool', '.', 'We', 'will', 'do', 'more', 'such', 'things', '.']

Tokenize Texts Without Stop Words:

['Oh', 'man', ',' 'pretty', 'cool', '.', 'We', 'things', '.']

Dependency Parsing

Parsing is divided into three prime categories further. And each class is different from the others. They are part of speech tagging, dependency parsing, and constituency phrasing.

The Part-Of-Speech (POS) is mainly for assigning different labels. It is what we call POS tags. These tags say about part of the speech of the words in a sentence. Whereas the dependency phrasing case: analyses the grammatical structure of the sentence. Based on the dependencies in the words of the sentences.

Whereas in constituency parsing: the sentence breakdown into sub-phrases. And these belong to a specific category like noun phrase (NP) and verb phrase (VP).

Final Thoughts

In this blog, you learned briefly about how NLP pipelines help computers understand human languages using various NLP processes.

Starting from NLP, what are language processing pipelines, how NLP makes communication easier between humans? And six insiders involved in NLP Pipelines.

The six steps involved in NLP pipelines are – sentence segmentation, word tokenization, part of speech for each token. Text lemmatization, identifying stop words, and dependency parsing.

More On This Topic

  • Natural Language Processing Key Terms, Explained
  • N-gram Language Modeling in Natural Language Processing
  • Natural Language Processing with spaCy
  • Applying Natural Language Processing in Healthcare
  • Linear Algebra for Natural Language Processing
  • How to Start Using Natural Language Processing with PyTorch
chakir.mahjoubi https://lexsense.net

Knowledge engineer with expertise in natural language processing, Chakir's work experience spans, language corpus creation, software localisation, data lineage, patent translation, glossary creation and statistical analysis of experimentally obtained results.

You May Also Like

More From Author