What is NLP?
NLP or Natural Language Processing is a field at the crossroads of linguistics, computer science and artificial intelligence. It involves the creation of software tools for understanding and manipulating natural languages, in the form of voice or text.
The field encompasses a variety of tasks that can be sorted into two broad subcategories:
- NLU (Natural Language Understanding) which involves transforming natural language into structured data.
- NLG (Natural Language Generation) which transforms structured data into natural language sentences.
You may not know it, but many of the applications you use every day rely on natural language processing. Examples include translation tools such as Google Translate and personal digital assistants such as Siri or Alexa. Similarly, word processors such as Microsoft Word and Grammarly use NLP to check the grammar and spelling of texts.
At LabSense, we approach the topic from various angles, predominantly focusing on automated text writing, document classification, text mining and customer review summaries.
Classification & text mining (NLU)
NLU or Natural Language Understanding is the ability for a program to “understand” natural language. But what do we mean by “understand”?
Generally, this means that a program is able to extract and identify certain pieces of information in a text, relate these to each other in order to give them meaning, and retrieve or use that meaning to perform an action accordingly. Depending on the task at hand, different levels of comprehension will be expected and different aspects of the text will be utilized.
NLU algorithms can be based on statistical models or rules indicating what to look for in a set of texts. They can also be based on Deep Learning models that offer an alternative approach to text analysis. NLU tasks include document classification and text mining.
To this end, Labsense uses a combination of these methods to provide a solution that extracts and classifies large amounts of information from textual content (product descriptions, real estate ads, etc.) in the form of structured data. Dig It, our solution, is an intelligent classification algorithm that can digest and classify a large amount of information in a matter of seconds. This allows us to enrich our clients’ databases!
Automated writing (NLG)
We speak of NLG when an algorithm is able to transform data into expressions or sentences from an internal representation.
It involves text planning, sentence planning and text creation:
- Text planning: Targeting relevant information from a knowledge base
- Sentence planning: Deciding which words are required to build sentences that make sense
- Text creation: Creating real text in a human language (English, French, etc.) from a syntactic representation.
At LabSense, our flagship solution is our text generation tool, Scribt! From structured data, the algorithm is able to generate SEO texts, product or service descriptions, social media posts… and all of this in multiple languages (FR, EN, DE, ES, IT, NL, PT)! The algorithm uses the three steps mentioned above to automatically mass-produce varied texts, taking into account the syntactic and semantic characteristics of each language to produce texts that are as authentic as possible.
The text is planned based on data provided by the client as well as related data (ONS, POI…) that we can source. Then, our internal software plans the sentences, taking into account the linguistic constraints of the target language. Finally, it moves on to the text creation stage to produce coherent, varied texts in an authentic language from structured data input!
With the NLG Scribt solution, it is possible to produce automated content and rapidly improve its quality in multiple languages!
Combining NLU and NLG
Lastly, NLU and NLG can be combined. Indeed, some tasks require the extraction of structured data from a variety of formats, followed by the generation of coherent text from this data.
At LabSense, we combine these two aspects of NLP in our customer review summaries. Today, customer reviews are a key decision-making factor for consumers, giving credit to products and brands. Verdicto is our dedicated tool in the matter. Our algorithm can take customer reviews in the form of star ratings, summarize them and transform them into real editorial content.
Verdicto analyzes the ratings given by customers and generates coherent text in flawless language, summarizing the customers’ opinions on any given product.
NLP algorithms are the go-to option for anyone wishing to automate high-quality content, better exploit large amounts of text and hone in on relevant data through information extraction.
So whether you’re already convinced or just curious, whatever your business needs, our solutions could be a valuable asset to you! Get in touch to find out how LabSense can help you stand out and stay ahead of the competition!
