Home Did you know ? Explanation of what NLP is and its significance in data science

Explanation of what NLP is and its significance in data science

by Mic Johnson

Natural Language Processing (NLP) essentially teaches computers to decipher text as we do, bridging the distance between human language and Data Science. Every piece of text or speech carries valuable data, from tweets to casual conversations. But the heterogeneous nature of languages, tones, and expressions makes text data extraction intricate. This is where advanced NLP data science techniques shine, revolutionizing sectors like Healthcare, Finance, Media, and HR. Consider voice assistants like Siri or Alexa, both fruits of NLP.

Diving into Core NLP Techniques for Data Science:

Bag of Words (BoW):

BoW analyzes text data by creating an occurrence matrix, ignoring grammar and word order. However, its simplicity is a double-edged sword; it lacks semantic awareness and can be skewed by frequently occurring words.

TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency):

A refinement over BoW, TF-IDF determines a word’s relevance in a document using statistics, ensuring pivotal words in content analysis aren’t overshadowed by frequent, less meaningful terms.

Tokenization:

Segmenting text into meaningful units or tokens is the essence of Tokenization. It’s not always as straightforward as splitting by spaces; tokens like “New Delhi” must remain intact, preserving their significance.

Stop Words Removal:

To focus on valuable words in data analytics insights, common words (like “and”, “the”) are often excluded from analysis.

Stemming:

It simplifies words to their base or root form, enhancing data processing efficiency. For instance, “walking” is reduced to “walk”.

Lemmatization:

While similar to stimming, Lemmatization is more nuanced, returning words to their dictionary form or lemma. It understands context, ensuring precision.

Topic Modeling:

This technique identifies major themes within a document. A popular method, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), is an unsupervised approach to discern a document’s primary topics.

Word Embeddings:

Word Embeddings convert words into number vectors. Words with similar meanings have closely spaced vectors, ensuring contextual representation.

Real-World Implementations of NLP Data Science:

  • Uber integrated NLP with its Facebook Messenger bot in 2015, enhancing customer outreach and personalization through data analytics insights.
  • E-commerce platforms harness NLP tools like Klevu for superior customer experience. This tool adapts to user interactions, offering tailored search recommendations.
  • Mastercard’s 2016 chatbot on Facebook Messenger employs NLP for tailored customer support, yielding an efficient, insightful customer experience without the cost of an independent app.

Wrapping Up:

This overview illuminates the vast potential and applications of NLP in data science. By combining NLP techniques with data science, businesses gain deeper insights, enhancing decision-making and strategies. Share this knowledge and spotlight the transformative power of NLP data science!.

You may also like