Lesson 1 · Natural Language Processing
NLP Fundamentals
6 min
You'll be able to
- Define natural language processing
- Understand why language is hard for machines
- List core NLP tasks
Natural language processing (NLP) is the branch of AI that helps machines understand and generate human language. It is deceptively hard: language is ambiguous, context-dependent, and full of exceptions.
Core tasks
- Sentiment analysis — is this review positive or negative?
- Text classification — what topic is this article?
- Machine translation — render meaning across languages.
- Question answering — find the answer to a query.
- Chatbots — hold coherent conversations.
The word 'bank' means one thing by a river and another at a finance desk — machines resolve this through context.
Challenge
Ambiguity hunt
Find two meanings for each word: 'bat', 'spring', 'run'. Note how context would resolve each.
Knowledge Check
NLP
Which task determines whether a review is positive or negative?
Language is easy for machines because words have fixed meanings.
Answer all questions to submit.