NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

1. INTRODUCTION

Businesses are inundated with unstructured data, and it’s impossible for them to analyze and
process all this data without the help of Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Read on to learn what natural language processing is, how NLP can make businesses more
effective, and discover popular natural language processing techniques and examples. Finally,
we’ll show you how to get started with easy-to-use NLP tools.

• What Is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?

• Why Is Natural Language Processing Important?
• How Does Natural Language Processing Work?
• Natural Language processing Examples
• Natural Language Processing Applications
• Natural Language Processing Tools

2. What Is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI). It helps machines
process and understand the human language so that they can automatically perform
repetitive tasks. Examples include machine translation, summarization, ticket classification,
and spell check.

Take sentiment analysis, for example, which uses natural language processing to detect
emotions in text. This classification task is one of the most popular tasks of NLP, often used

1
by businesses to automatically detect brand sentiment on social media. Analyzing these
interactions can help brands detect urgent customer issues that they need to respond to right
away, or monitor overall customer satisfaction.

3. Why Is Natural Language Processing Important?

One of the main reasons natural language processing is so critical to businesses is that it can
be used to analyze large volumes of text data, like social media comments, customer support
tickets, online reviews, news reports, and more.

All this business data contains a wealth of valuable insights, and NLP can quickly help
businesses discover what those insights are.

It does this by helping machines make sense of human language in a faster, more accurate,
and more consistent way than human agents.

NLP tools process data in real time, 24/7, and apply the same criteria to all your data, so you
can ensure the results you receive are accurate – and not riddled with inconsistencies.

Once NLP tools can understand what a piece of text is about, and even measure things like
sentiment, businesses can start to prioritize and organize their data in a way that suits their
needs.

Challenges of NLP

While there are many challenges in natural language processing, the benefits of NLP for
businesses are huge making NLP a worthwhile investment.

However, it’s important to know what those challenges are before getting started with NLP.

Human language is complex, ambiguous, disorganized, and diverse. There are more than
6,500 languages in the world, all of them with their own syntactic and semantic rules.

Even humans struggle to make sense of language.

So for machines to understand natural language, it first needs to be transformed into

something that they can interpret.

In NLP, syntax and semantic analysis are key to understanding the grammatical structure of a
text and identifying how words relate to each other in a given context. But, transforming text
into something machines can process is complicated.

Data scientists need to teach NLP tools to look beyond definitions and word order, to
understand context, word ambiguities, and other complex concepts connected to human
language.

2
 4. How Does Natural Language Processing Work?
In natural language processing, human language is separated into fragments so that the
grammatical structure of sentences and the meaning of words can be analyzed and
understood in context. This helps computers read and understand spoken or written text in
the same way as humans.

Here are a few fundamental NLP pre-processing tasks data scientists need to perform before
NLP tools can make sense of human language:

• Tokenization: breaks down text into smaller semantic units or single clauses
• Part-of-speech-tagging: marking up words as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs,
pronouns, etc
• Stemming and lemmatization: standardizing words by reducing them to their root
forms
• Stop word removal: filtering out common words that add little or no unique
information, for example, prepositions and articles (at, to, a, the).

Only then can NLP tools transform text into something a machine can understand.

The next step is to build an NLP algorithm.

Natural Language Processing Algorithms

Once your data has been pre-processed, it’s time to move onto the next step: building an NLP
algorithm, and training it so it can interpret natural language and perform specific tasks.

There are two main algorithms you can use to solve NLP problems:

1. A rule-based approach. Rule-based systems rely on hand-crafted grammatical rules

that need to be created by experts in linguistics, or knowledge engineers. This was the
earliest approach to crafting NLP algorithms, and it’s still used today.
2. Machine learning algorithms. Machine learning models, on the other hand, are based
on statistical methods and learn to perform tasks after being fed examples (training
data).

The biggest advantage of machine learning algorithms is their ability to learn on their own.
You don’t need to define manual rules – instead machines learn from previous data to make
predictions on their own, allowing for more flexibility.

Machine learning algorithms are fed training data and expected outputs (tags) to train
machines to make associations between a particular input and its corresponding output.
Machines then use statistical analysis methods to build their own “knowledge bank” and
discern which features best represent the texts, before making predictions for unseen data
(new texts):

3
 5. Natural Language Processing Examples
Natural Language Processing enables you to perform a variety of tasks, from classifying text
and extracting relevant pieces of data, to translating text from one language to another and
summarizing long pieces of content.

Text Classification

Text classification is one of the most basic NLP tasks and consists of assigning categories (tags)
to a text, based on its content. Classification models can serve different purposes, for
example:

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is the process of analyzing emotions within a text and classifying them as
positive, negative, or neutral. By running sentiment analysis on social media posts, product
reviews, NPS surveys, and customer feedback, businesses can gain valuable insights about
how customers perceive their brand.Take these Zoom customer and product reviews, for
example:

4
Equipped with natural language processing, a sentiment classifier can understand the nuance
of each opinion and automatically tag the first review as Negative and the second one
as Positive. Imagine there’s a spike in negative comments about your brand on social
media; sentiment analysis tools would be able to detect this immediately so you can take
action before a bigger problem arises.

Topic Classification

Topic classification consists of identifying the main themes or topics within a text and
assigning predefined tags. For training your topic classifier, you’ll need to be familiar with the
data you’re analyzing, so you can define relevant categories. For example, you might work for
a software company, and receive a lot of customer support tickets that mention technical
issues, usability, and feature requests.In this case, you might define your tags as Bugs, Feature
Requests, and UX/IX.

Intent Detection

Intent detection consists of identifying the purpose, goal, or intention behind a text. It’s an
excellent way of sorting outbound sales email responses by Interested, Need Information,
Unsubscribe, Bounce, etc. The tag Interested could help you spot a potential sale opportunity
as soon as an email enters your inbox!

Text Extraction

Another example of NLP is text extraction, which consists of pulling out specific pieces of data
that are already present in a text. It’s a perfect way to automatically summarize text or find
key information. The most common examples of extraction models are:

Keyword Extraction

Keyword extraction automatically extracts the most important words and expressions within
a text. This can provide you with a sort of preview of the content and its main topics, without
needing to read each piece. Check out this feature request, below, processed with
MonkeyLearn’s public keyword extractor:

5
Named Entity Recognition (NER)

Named Entity Recognition (NER) allows you to extract the names of people, companies,
places, etc. from your data.

Machine Translation

This was one of the first problems addressed by NLP researchers. Online translation tools (like
Google Translate) use different natural language processing techniques to achieve human-
levels of accuracy in translating speech and text to different languages. Custom translators
models can be trained for a specific domain to maximize the accuracy of the results.

Topic Modeling

Topic modeling is similar to topic classification. This example of natural language processing
finds relevant topics in a text by grouping texts with similar words and expressions.

Since you don’t need to create a list of predefined tags or tag any data, it’s a good option for
exploratory analysis, when you are not yet familiar with your data.

6
Natural Language Generation (NLG)

Natural language generation, NLG for short, is a natural language processing task that consists
of analyzing unstructured data and using it as an input to automatically create content.

It can be used to generate automated answers, write emails, and even books!

6. Natural Language Processing Applications

Natural language processing allows businesses to make sense of unstructured data ― like
emails, social media posts, product reviews, online surveys, and customer support tickets ―
and gain valuable insights to enhance their decision-making processes. Companies are also
using NLP to automate routine tasks, reducing times and costs, and ultimately becoming more
efficient.

Here are some examples of how businesses are putting NLP into practice:

Automatically Analyze Customer Feedback

Analyzing customer feedback is essential to know what clients think about your product.
However, this data may be difficult to process. NLP can help you leverage qualitative
data from online surveys, product reviews, or social media posts, and get insights to improve
your business.

For example, NPS surveys are often used to measure customer satisfaction. First, customers
are asked to score a company from 0 to 10 based on how likely they are to recommend it to
a friend (low scorers are categorized as Detractors, average scorers as Passives and high
scorers as Promoters); then, an open-ended follow-up question asks customers the reasons
for their score.

Using an NLP topic classifier, you can tag each open-ended response with categories like
like Product UX, Customer Support, Ease of Use, etc. Then, further categorize this data into
Promoters, Detractors, and Passives, to see which topics are most prevalent within each
group:

7
In this example, above, the results show that customers are highly satisfied with aspects
like Ease of Use and Product UX (since most of these responses are from Promoters), while
they’re not so happy with Product Features.

Automate Customer Support Tasks

Businesses are using NLP models to automate tedious and time-consuming tasks in areas like
customer service. This results in more efficient processes, and agents with more time to focus
on what matters most: delivering outstanding support experiences.

Customer service automation powered by NLP includes a series of processes, from routing
tickets to the most appropriate agent, to using chatbots to solve frequent queries. Here are
some examples:

• Text classification models allow companies to tag incoming support tickets based on
different criteria, like topic, sentiment, or language, and route tickets to the most
suitable pool of agents. An e-commerce company, for example, might use a topic
classifier to identify if a support ticket refers to a shipping problem, missing item, or
return item, among other categories.
• Classifiers can also be used to detect urgency in customer support tickets by
recognizing expressions such as ‘ASAP, immediately, or right now’, allowing agents to
tackle these first.

Here’s an example of how you can use MonkeyLearn’s urgency detector to spot an issue that
needs to be solved right away

8
 • Customer support teams are increasingly using chatbots to handle routine queries.
This reduces costs, enables support agents to focus on more fulfilling tasks that
require more personalization, and cuts customer waiting times.

7. Top NLP Tools to Help You Get Started

Natural language processing is one of the most complex fields within artificial intelligence.
But, trying your hand at NLP tasks like sentiment analysis or keyword extraction needn’t be
so difficult. There are many online NLP tools that make language processing accessible to
everyone, allowing you to analyze large volumes of data in a very simple and intuitive way.

SaaS platforms are great alternatives to open-source libraries, since they provide ready-to-
use solutions that are often easy to use, and don’t require programming or machine learning
knowledge.

If you want to integrate tools with your existing tools, most of these tools offer NLP APIs in
Python (requiring you to enter a few lines of code) and integrations with apps you use every
day.

6 of the Best SaaS NLP Tools:

1. MonkeyLearn
2. Google Cloud NLP
3. IBM Watson
4. Aylien
5. Amazon Comprehend
6. Meaning Cloud

The NLP tool you choose will depend on which one you feel most comfortable using, and the
tasks you want to carry out.

For example, MonkeyLearn offers a series of offers a series of no-code NLP tools that are
ready for you to start using right away.

Once you get the hang of these tools, you can build a customized machine learning model,
which you can train with your own criteria to get more accurate results.

Check out these tutorials once you’re ready to start building your own custom NLP model:

• How to build a custom classifier

• How to build a custom extractor

9
 8. HOW TO BUILD A CUSTOM CLASSIFIER
Five Steps to Build a Classifier

1. Start here to build a custom model, and then click "Classifier"

2. Import your text data by uploading files directly or connecting with an outside app.

If you are uploading data with previously defined tags, click the option at the bottom
"Upload already tagged samples".

10
3. Selecting the columns containing the texts. This is the data you will build and test the
model with. If you select multiple columns the data will be concatenated or joined together.

3. Define the tags you will use for the classifier. At least two are needed initially, more
can be added at a later stage.

11
5. Tag each text that appears by the appropriate tag or tags. This will help train the model.

Using a Trained Classifier

The classification model is now trained with the training data and tags you provided. It can
be used to classify new text or be trained further.
Processing Text under the "Run" Tab

You can test your trained model by pasting in text and seeing what the predictions will be.

Or upload a file directly to process text in a batch all at once.

12
🔍 Building Further Accuracy

Go to the Build Tab to see options to further train the module by tagging more texts.

In Data, you can see all your text data, filter by tags, and select texts to perform bulk
operations.

Once you have tagged enough text data, you can begin to see classifier stats in the Stats
section. At the overall level, you will see data for Accuracy and F1score. Clicking on each tag
will show you that tag's precision and recall, as well as keywords.

13
More on working with Custom Classifiers:
• Defining Tags
• Classifier Statistics
• Integration Options

More on how to improve your custom classifier and make it more accurate:
• Add More Training Data
• Remove Tags That Are Too Small or Too Niche
• Focus on the Low Performing Tags
• Find Tagging Mistakes
• Review Your Tagging Criteria Consistency
• How to Improve Recall and Precision
• Using Keywords to Increase Classifier Performance

9. HOW TO BUILD A CUSTOM EXTRACTOR

Five steps to build a Custom Extractor

1. Start here to build a custom model, and then click "Extractor".

14
2. Import your text data by uploading files directly, connecting with an outside app, or try
out a sample data set.

3. Specify the data that will help train the model by selecting the columns with the text
samples. If you select multiple columns the data will be concatenated, or joined together.

15
4. Define the tags (or pieces of information) that you will use for the extractor. At least one
tag is needed, more can be added later. See our tag reference here.

5. Tag the words that appear by selecting the tags on the right and clicking on the text that
they represent. This will help train the model. A given number of texts are needed to train
the model.

👉 After annotating tags in some texts, the model will learn from your tags and begin to
make suggestions automatically.

16
Using a Trained Extractor
Your extraction model is now trained with the training samples and entities you provided. It
can be used to extract new text, or you can train it further.

Processing Text under the "Run" Tab

You can test your extractor by pasting in new text and clicking "Extract Text". The tags
extracted will be listed on the right under "Results" with the associated value.

Or run a batch process by uploading a file with new samples directly.

17
🔍 Building Further Accuracy
Go to the "Build" tab to see options to further train the model by annotating more texts.

In Data, you can see all your text data, filter by tags, and select texts to make changes to
previously annotated texts and perform bulk operations.

18
 10.CONCLUSION
Natural language processing is one of the most promising fields within Artificial Intelligence,
and it’s already present in many applications we use on a daily basis, from chatbots to search
engines.

Thanks to NLP, businesses are automating some of their daily processes and making the most
of their unstructured data, getting actionable insights that they can use to improve customer
satisfaction and deliver better customer experiences.

Despite being a complex field, NLP is becoming more and more accessible to users thanks to
online tools like MonkeyLearn, which make it simple to create customized models for tasks
like text classification and text extraction.

19