Introduction to NLP
- NLP stands for Natural Language Processing.
- It is a branch of Artificial Intelligence.
- Helps computers understand, interpret, and respond to human language.
- Bridges the gap between human communication and machines.
- Used in many real-world applications today.
History and Evolution
- Early NLP was rule-based, relying on fixed grammar rules.
- Then came statistical models using probabilities for predictions.
- Later, machine learning improved text processing accuracy.
- Now, deep learning models like BERT and GPT dominate the field.
- NLP continues to evolve rapidly with better results.
NLP in Everyday Life
- Chatbots provide customer support in apps and websites.
- Google Translate helps in language translation.
- Voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant use NLP.
- Email spam filters identify unwanted emails automatically.
- Even search engines use NLP to improve results.
How Computers Understand Language
- Computers cannot directly understand human text.
- Words are converted into numbers and structured data.
- Algorithms analyze these numbers to find patterns.
- This allows machines to process meaning from text.
- Example: breaking a sentence into tokens for analysis.
TF-IDF
- TF-IDF means Term Frequency – Inverse Document Frequency.
- It finds which words are important in a document.
- Common words like 'the' or 'is' are given less weight.
- Rare but meaningful words get higher importance.
- Widely used in information retrieval and search engines.
Word Embeddings
- Words are represented as numerical vectors.
- These vectors capture meaning and relationships.
- Similar words are placed close in vector space.
- Example: 'king – man + woman = queen'.
- Helps machines understand semantic meaning.
Understanding Context
- Earlier models looked at words separately.
- Modern NLP considers surrounding words (context).
- Context gives more accurate interpretation of meaning.
- Models like BERT, GPT excel in this.
- This makes chatbots and translators much smarter.