What is the difference between machine learning and natural language processing?

Machine learning is a subfield of artificial intelligence that focuses on algorithms that learn from data. It is used to develop models and algorithms that can make predictions or decisions based on data. Examples include facial recognition, fraud detection and self-driving cars.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a subfield of artificial intelligence that focuses on understanding and processing human language. It is used to analyze and interpret natural language text or speech and is used for tasks such as sentiment analysis, question answering and machine translation. An example of NLP is Amazon Alexa, which can understand and respond to voice commands.

What are the different methods of Natural Language Processing?

1. Tokenization: This is the process of breaking down a sentence into smaller pieces, such as words or phrases. For example, “The cat sat on the mat” can be broken down into “The”, “cat”, “sat”, “on”, “the”, and “mat”.

2. Part-of-Speech (POS) Tagging: This is the process of assigning a part-of-speech label to each word in a sentence, such as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc. For example, “The cat sat on the mat” can be tagged as “Determiner (The) – Noun (cat) – Verb (sat) – Preposition (on) – Determiner (the) – Noun (mat)”.

3. Stemming and Lemmatization: This is the process of reducing inflected (or sometimes derived) words to their word stem, base or root form. For example, “cats” can be reduced to “cat” and “running” can be reduced to “run”.

4. Named Entity Recognition (NER): This is the process of identifying and classifying named entities such as people, locations, organizations, and dates in a sentence. For example, “John works at Microsoft” can be recognized as “Person (John) – Organization (Microsoft)”.

5. Syntactic Parsing: This is the process of analyzing a sentence to determine its grammatical structure and relationship between the different components. For example, “John works at Microsoft” can be parsed as “Subject (John) – Verb (works) – Preposition (at) – Object (Microsoft)”.

6. Semantic Analysis: This is the process of analyzing the meaning of a sentence to determine its relationship with other sentences. For example, “John works at Microsoft” can be analyzed to determine that John is employed by Microsoft.

What is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence that deals with the interaction between computers and human (natural) languages. It uses techniques such as machine learning, deep learning, and natural language understanding to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data.

For example, NLP can be used to analyze customer reviews to determine the sentiment of the text, or to extract key phrases and topics from customer feedback. It can also be used to generate natural language responses to customer inquiries, or to automatically classify customer inquiries into categories.