Natural Language Processing: From Text to Meaning Natural Language Processing helps computers understand human language. From raw text, it can pull meaning, detect sentiment, answer questions, or summarize content. The journey moves from data to insight: preprocess text, turn words into numbers, and apply a model that makes predictions or generates output.
How NLP works Data and preprocessing: gather text, clean it, lower case, remove noise, and split into words or tokens. Representation: convert tokens into numbers through embeddings. This step lets machines compare words by meaning, not just spelling. Models: use rules, statistics, or neural networks. Modern NLP relies on large language models that learn from many texts. Evaluation: measure accuracy, precision, recall, or special metrics like BLEU for translation or ROUGE for summaries. Clear goals help choose the right metric. A simple example Consider a short product review. The system preprocesses the text, identifies positive and negative phrases, and highlights main topics such as price, quality, and speed. The output could be a sentiment score plus a list of topics, helping a business see what customers care about.
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