Understanding the Basics of NLP

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary area of research aimed at making machines understand and process human languages. It is an evolving field, with a rapid increase in its acceptability and adoption in industry, and its growth is projected to continue. NLP-based applications are everywhere, and chances are that you already interact with an NLP-enabled application regularly (Alexa, Google Translate, chatbots, and so on). The objective of this book is to provide a hands-on learning experience and help you build NLP applications by understanding key NLP concepts. The book lays particular emphasis on Machine Learning (ML)- and Deep Learning (DL)-based applications and also delves into recent advances such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). We start this journey by providing a brief context of NLP and introduce you to some existing and evolving applications of NLP.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

• Programming languages versus natural languages
• Why should I learn NLP?
• Current applications of NLP