What is NLP and what does NER mean?
By Sasha Ceretti, AI Consultant at etermax AI Labs
In line with our articles Digital Transformation: the role of Artificial Intelligence on automation initiatives and Computer vision: What is it and how is it used? where we discussed, among other things, what Computer Vision and OCR are, we must now delve into the field of NLP and NER; in other words, the comprehension stage. But, comprehension of what exactly? Comprehension, in our case, of natural language texts.
When we say natural language we refer to the standard word languages, mainly those inhabiting digital spaces. Day after day, thousands of users generate plenty of content on social media, workplace tools, physical documents that are later digitized — among others — that will constitute an immense flow of data, in other words, of accumulated information.
NLP, short for Natural Language Processing, is the method used to process natural language at a large scale. The processing and automation of large volumes of texts allows us to organize, categorize, and, lastly, analyze said textual data in a much more nimble, precise, and quick manner than doing it manually.
Clearly, having a group of people read and organize a hundred texts manually is not the same as having them introduce the same texts digitally into an NLP Model. The texts will be “read” and processed, ready to be organized and/or classified in a much shorter time.
The automation of text processing has become a standard practice particularly for those companies that have large amounts of data and need to speed up analyses, make methods more efficient, but, above all, optimize their time and resources. Also, machine learning technology is sometimes applied to NLP Models. This technology consists of training algorithms with sample data to make the process more efficient. A great example of this are the famous chatbots, which are trained with possible phrases a user could say when interacting with them.
At etermax AI Labs we apply NER — short for named entity recognition — which is one of the tasks encompassed within NLP. During this “recognition” we can ask the tool to help us understand the what, who, and where of a text or a group of texts, for example.
At the end of the day, we offer NLP and NER models to boost our clients’ business solutions and maximize the efficiency when processing information.
In our next article we will tell you, in simple terms, how Models are trained, tested, and maintained. Don’t miss it!