What is NLU: A Guide to Understanding Natural Language Processing

The NLU-based text analysis can link specific speech patterns to negative emotions and high effort levels. This reduces the cost to serve with shorter calls, and improves customer feedback. NLU is central to question-answering systems that enhance semantic search in the enterprise and connect employees to business data, charts, information, and resources. It’s also central to customer support applications that answer high-volume, low-complexity questions, reroute requests, direct users to manuals or products, and lower all-around customer service costs. Natural language understanding interprets the meaning that the user communicates and classifies it into proper intents.

• After all, different sentences can mean the same thing, and, vice versa, the same words can mean different things depending on how they are used.
• Quickly extract information from a document such as author, title, images, and publication dates.
• NLG is a process whereby computer-readable data is turned into human-readable data, so it’s the opposite of NLP, in a way.

Moreover, mundane and repetitive tasks are often at risk of human error, which can result in dire repercussions if the target documents are of a sensitive nature. The voice assistant uses the framework of Natural Language Processing to understand what is being said, and it uses Natural Language Generation to respond in a human-like manner. There is Natural Language Understanding at work as well, helping the voice assistant to judge the intention of the question. Chatbots using NLP have the ability to analyze sentiment, perceiving positive or negative connotations in a text. It is a skill widely used by marketing experts for analyzing interactions on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

Voices of Change

There are so many possible use-cases for NLU and NLP and as more advancements are made in this space, we will begin to see an increase of uses across all spaces. Data capture is the process of extracting information from paper or electronic documents and converting it into data for key systems. Using NLU, voice assistants can recognize spoken instructions and take action based on those instructions. For example, a user might say, “Hey Siri, schedule a meeting for 2 pm with John Smith.” The voice assistant would use NLU to understand the command and then access the user’s calendar to schedule the meeting. Similarly, say, “Alexa, send an email to my boss.” Alexa would use NLU to understand the request and then compose and send the email on the user’s behalf. Another challenge that NLU faces is syntax level ambiguity, where the meaning of a sentence could be dependent on the arrangement of words.

If humans struggle to develop perfectly aligned understanding of human language due to these congenital linguistic challenges, it stands to reason that machines will struggle when encountering this unstructured data. For instance, depending on the context, “It’s cold in here” could be interpreted as a request to close the window or turn up the heat. This could include analyzing emotions to understand what customers are happy or unhappy about.

Demystifying NLU: A Guide to Understanding Natural Language Processing

Moreover, the software can also perform useful secondary tasks such as automatic entity extraction to identify key information that may be useful when making timely business decisions. The purpose of these buckets is to contain examples of speech that, although different, have the same or similar meaning. For instance, the same bucket may contain the phrases “book me a ride” and “Please, call a taxi to my location”, as the intent of both phrases alludes to the same action.

In the case of chatbots created to be virtual assistants to customers, the training data they receive will be relevant to their duties and they will fail to comprehend concepts related to other topics. Just like humans, if an AI hasn’t been taught the right concepts then it will not have the information to handle complex duties. The aim of NLU is to allow computer software to understand natural human language in verbal and written form. NLU works by using algorithms to convert human speech into a well-defined data model of semantic and pragmatic definitions. It’s frustrating to feel misunderstood, whether you’re communicating with a person or a bot.

NLU aims to understand the intent, context, and emotions behind the words used in a text. It involves techniques like sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, and coreference resolution. NLP and NLU are similar but differ in the complexity of the tasks they can perform. NLP focuses on processing and analyzing text data, such as language translation or speech recognition.

It can be used to help customers better understand the products and services that they’re interested in, or it can be used to help businesses better understand their customers’ needs. A data capture application will enable users to enter information into fields on a web form using natural language pattern matching rather than typing out every area manually with their keyboard. It makes it much quicker for users since they don’t need to remember what each field means or how they should fill it out correctly with their keyboard (e.g., date format). Natural language understanding is the process of identifying the meaning of a text, and it’s becoming more and more critical in business. Natural language understanding software can help you gain a competitive advantage by providing insights into your data that you never had access to before. For computers to get closer to having human-like intelligence and capabilities, they need to be able to understand the way we humans speak.

The Impact of NLU on Customer Experience

This allows users to read content in their native language without relying on human translators. With Natural Language Understanding, contact centres can create the next stage in customer service. Enhanced virtual assistant IVRs will be able to direct calls to the right agent depending on their individual needs. It may even be possible to pick up on cues in speech that indicate customer sentiment or emotion too. Customers may even be able to launch business conversations through Alexa or Siri. Often, Natural Language Understanding is a common component in the construction of virtual assistants, which allow customers to easily engage with modern self-service systems.

NLU analyses text input to understand what humans mean by extracting Intent and Intent Details. Natural language understanding (NLU) assists in detecting, recognizing, and measuring the sentiment behind a statement, opinion, or context, which can be very helpful in influencing purchase decisions. It is also beneficial in understanding brand perception, helping you figure out how your customers (and the market in general) feel about your brand and your offerings.

The Easiest Way to Work with Data

All you’ll need is a collection of intents and slots and a set of example utterances for each intent, and we’ll train and package a model that you can download and include in your application. Turn speech into software commands by classifying intent and slot variables from speech. When you ask Siri to call a specific person, NLP is responsible for displaying the text of your spoken command on the screen. NLU then interprets that information and executes the command by dialing the correct phone number.

Both ‘you’ and ‘I’ in the above sentences are known as stopwords and will be ignored by traditional algorithms. Deep learning models (without the removal of stopwords) understand how these words are connected to each other and can, therefore, infer that the sentences are different. Automate data capture to improve lead qualification, support escalations, and find new business opportunities. For example, ask customers questions and capture their answers using Access Service Requests (ASRs) to fill out forms and qualify leads. Businesses use Autopilot to build conversational applications such as messaging bots, interactive voice response (phone IVRs), and voice assistants.

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