Natural Language Processing(NLP)

Many think that NLP is a relatively new concept in computer science.I strongly disagree with that. NLP application like search engine (Information Retrieval System) is the most important piece of application that we use everyday life.Yet this was just a beginning. Since the search engine we really have not seen any significant NLP application(though many improved version of translation system,recommendation system embedded into many applications).

But the proliferation of Social Media (Facebook,Twitter and bla bla) has generated new attention on NLP. People talking heavily on how this massive big data generated by social media applications will help us and our business.The answer lies in building intelligent system that has natural language processing capabilities.

Researches already taking place on opinion mining of twitter data i.e. extracting sentiments from a tweet.This has many uses.For example in the last US Presidential Election Barack Obama Campaign Team has done lot of social data mining,text mining job to gauge public sentiments.Many companies are using sentiment tracking of their product reviews generated from blogs,facebook and twitter.

NLP uses many of the statistical learning algorithm from training the systems. There are two categories of learning algorithms-supervised and unsupervised.Supervised learning algorithms are based on Bayes Theorem and Unsupervised algorithms are  based on Markov model.There are many interesting learning algorithm exist in the machine learning paradigm.

Soon or later we will be building intelligent web robots with NLP capability who can learn from a blog like this and increase the knowledge base.Then the question will come how this knowledge would be useful to human?