NLP vs NLU vs. NLG Baeldung on Computer Science

Just think of all the online text you consume daily, social media, news, research, product websites, and more. Natural Language Generation(NLG) is a sub-component of Natural language processing that helps in generating the output in a natural language based on the input provided by the user. This component responds to the user in the same language in which the input was provided say the user asks something in English then the system will return the output in English.

For example, the suffix -ed on a word, like called, indicates past tense, but it has the same base infinitive (to call) as the present tense verb calling. NLP is a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that bridges human and machine language to enable more natural human-to-computer communication. When information goes into a typical NLP system, it goes through various phases, including lexical analysis, discourse integration, https://chat.openai.com/ pragmatic analysis, parsing, and semantic analysis. It encompasses methods for extracting meaning from text, identifying entities in the text, and extracting information from its structure.NLP enables machines to understand text or speech and generate relevant answers. It is also applied in text classification, document matching, machine translation, named entity recognition, search autocorrect and autocomplete, etc.

In addition to processing natural language similarly to a human, NLG-trained machines are now able to generate new natural language text—as if written by another human. All this has sparked a lot of interest both from commercial adoption and academics, making NLP one of the most active research topics in AI today. Thus, it helps businesses to understand customer needs and offer them personalized products. Explore some of the latest NLP research at IBM or take a look at some of IBM’s product offerings, like Watson Natural Language Understanding. Its text analytics service offers insight into categories, concepts, entities, keywords, relationships, sentiment, and syntax from your textual data to help you respond to user needs quickly and efficiently. Help your business get on the right track to analyze and infuse your data at scale for AI.

What is natural language processing?

This helps in identifying the role of each word in a sentence and understanding the grammatical structure. Today the CMSWire community consists of over 5 million influential customer experience, customer service and digital experience leaders, the majority of whom are based in North America and employed by medium to large organizations. Therefore, their predicting abilities improve as they are exposed to more data. Businesses like restaurants, hotels, and retail stores use tickets for customers to report problems with services or products they’ve purchased.

However, in the future, as AI systems move from machine learning to machine reasoning, NLU will itself be much broader as it starts to encapsulate developing areas of common sense and machine reasoning, areas where AI currently struggles. In this context, when we talk about NLP vs. NLU, we’re referring both to the literal interpretation of what humans mean by what they write or say and also the more general understanding of their intent and understanding. That’s where NLP & NLU techniques work together to ensure that the huge pile of unstructured data is made accessible to AI.

This is especially important for model longevity and reusability so that you can adapt your model as data is added or other conditions change. It is best to compare the performances of different solutions by using objective metrics. Computers can perform language-based analysis for 24/7  in a consistent and unbiased manner. Considering the amount of raw data produced every day, NLU and hence NLP are critical for efficient analysis of this data. A well-developed NLU-based application can read, listen to, and analyze this data. Each plays a unique role at various stages of a conversation between a human and a machine.

NLU Basics: Understanding Language Processing

Tokenization is the process of breaking down text into individual words or tokens. There has been no drop-off in research intensity as demonstrated by the 93 language experts, 54 of which work in NLP or AI, who were ranked in the top 100,000 most-cited scientists in Elsevier BV’s updated author-citation dataset. Here are some of the best NLP papers from the Association for Computational Linguistics 2022 conference.

• NLP and NLU, two subfields of artificial intelligence (AI), facilitate understanding and responding to human language.
• This creates a black box where data goes in, decisions go out, and there is limited visibility into how one impacts the other.
• This period was marked by the use of hand-written rules for language processing.
• Conversely, NLU focuses on extracting the context and intent, or in other words, what was meant.
• NLU enables human-computer interaction by analyzing language versus just words.
• Some are centered directly on the models and their outputs, others on second-order concerns, such as who has access to these systems, and how training them impacts the natural world.

While NLP breaks down the language into manageable pieces for analysis, NLU interprets the nuances, ambiguities, and contextual cues of the language to grasp the full meaning of the text. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. It’s the difference between recognizing the words in a sentence and understanding the sentence’s sentiment, purpose, or request. NLU enables more sophisticated interactions between humans and machines, such as accurately answering questions, participating in conversations, and making informed decisions based on the understood intent. In this case, NLU can help the machine understand the contents of these posts, create customer service tickets, and route these tickets to the relevant departments. This intelligent robotic assistant can also learn from past customer conversations and use this information to improve future responses. NLP is an already well-established, decades-old field operating at the cross-section of computer science, artificial intelligence, an increasingly data mining.

What are the leading NLU companies?

E-commerce applications, as well as search engines, such as Google and Microsoft Bing, are using NLP to understand their users. These companies have also seen benefits of NLP helping with descriptions and search features. Major internet companies are training their systems to understand the context of a word in a sentence or employ users’ previous searches to help them optimize future searches and provide more relevant results to that individual. Thus, we need AI embedded rules in NLP to process with machine learning and data science. Pursuing the goal to create a chatbot that can hold a conversation with humans, researchers are developing chatbots that will be able to process natural language. This magic trick is achieved through a combination of NLP techniques such as named entity recognition, tokenization, and part-of-speech tagging, which help the machine identify and analyze the context and relationships within the text.

To pass the test, a human evaluator will interact with a machine and another human at the same time, each in a different room. If the evaluator is not able to reliably tell the difference between the response generated by the machine and the other human, then the machine passes the test and is considered to be exhibiting “intelligent” behavior. Sentiment analysis, thus NLU, can locate fraudulent reviews by identifying the text’s emotional character. For instance, inflated statements and an excessive amount of punctuation may indicate a fraudulent review. Questionnaires about people’s habits and health problems are insightful while making diagnoses. The verb that precedes it, swimming, provides additional context to the reader, allowing us to conclude that we are referring to the flow of water in the ocean.

It enables conversational AI solutions to accurately identify the intent of the user and respond to it. When it comes to conversational AI, the critical point is to understand what the user says or wants to say in both speech and written language. NLG is another subcategory of NLP which builds sentences and creates text responses understood by humans. For customer service departments, sentiment analysis is a valuable tool used to monitor opinions, emotions and interactions. Sentiment analysis is the process of identifying and categorizing opinions expressed in text, especially in order to determine whether the writer’s attitude is positive, negative or neutral. Sentiment analysis enables companies to analyze customer feedback to discover trending topics, identify top complaints and track critical trends over time.

It comprises the majority of enterprise data and includes everything from text contained in email, to PDFs and other document types, chatbot dialog, social media, etc. NLG is a subfield of NLP that focuses on the generation of human-like language by computers. NLG systems take structured data or information as input and generate coherent and contextually relevant natural language output. NLG is employed in various applications such as chatbots, automated report generation, summarization systems, and content creation.

Understanding the sentiment and urgency of customer communications allows businesses to prioritize issues, responding first to the most critical concerns. The history of NLU and NLP goes back to the mid-20th century, with significant milestones marking its evolution. In 1957, Noam Chomsky’s work on “Syntactic Structures” introduced the concept of universal grammar, laying a foundational framework for understanding the structure of language that would later influence NLP development. NLU helps computers to understand human language by understanding, analyzing and interpreting basic speech parts, separately.

It’s built on Google’s highly advanced NLU models and provides an easy-to-use interface for integrating NLU into your applications. To make your NLU journey even more accessible, some specialized tools and frameworks provide abstractions and simplify the building process. Several popular pre-trained NLU models are available today, such as BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3).

His current active areas of research are conversational AI and algorithmic bias in AI. NLP can process text from grammar, structure, typo, and point of view—but it will be NLU that will help the machine infer the intent behind the language text. So, even though there are many overlaps between NLP and NLU, this differentiation sets them distinctly apart.

With FAQ chatbots, businesses can reduce their customer care workload (see Figure 5). As a result, they do not require both excellent NLU skills and intent recognition. NLU empowers customer support automation by automating the routing of customer queries to the right department, understanding customer sentiments, and providing relevant solutions. Pre-trained NLU models are models already trained on vast amounts of data and capable of general language understanding. Machine learning uses computational methods to train models on data and adjust (and ideally, improve) its methods as more data is processed.

For instance, BERT has been fine-tuned for tasks ranging from fact-checking to writing headlines. Throughout the years various attempts at processing natural language or English-like sentences presented to computers have taken place at varying degrees of complexity. Some attempts have not resulted in systems with deep understanding, but have helped overall system usability.

NLP techniques such as tokenization, stemming, and parsing are employed to break down sentences into their constituent parts, like words and phrases. This process enables the extraction of valuable information from the text and allows for a more in-depth analysis of linguistic patterns. For example, NLP can identify noun phrases, verb phrases, and other grammatical structures in sentences.

Developers need to understand the difference between natural language processing and natural language understanding so they can build successful conversational applications. Based on some data or query, an NLG system would fill in the blank, like a game of Mad Libs. But over time, natural language generation systems have evolved with the application of hidden Markov chains, recurrent neural networks, and transformers, enabling more dynamic text generation in real time. Artificial intelligence is critical to a machine’s ability to learn and process natural language. So, when building any program that works on your language data, it’s important to choose the right AI approach. However, the challenge in translating content is not just linguistic but also cultural.

These models have significantly improved the ability of machines to process and generate human language, leading to the creation of advanced language models like GPT-3. There’s no doubt that AI and machine learning technologies are changing the ways that companies deal with and approach their vast amounts of unstructured data. Companies are applying their advanced technology in this area to bring more visibility, understanding and analytical power over what has often been called the dark matter of the enterprise. The market for unstructured text analysis is increasingly attracting offerings from major platform providers, as well as startups.

This personalized approach not only enhances customer engagement but also boosts the efficiency of marketing campaigns by ensuring that resources are directed toward the most receptive audiences. Stay updated with the latest news, expert advice and in-depth analysis on customer-first marketing, commerce and digital experience design. Here is a benchmark article by SnipsAI, AI voice platform, comparing F1-scores, a measure of accuracy, of different conversational AI providers. For example, a recent Gartner report points out the importance of NLU in healthcare.

NLG’s core function is to explain structured data in meaningful sentences humans can understand.NLG systems try to find out how computers can communicate what they know in the best way possible. So the system must first learn what it should say and then determine how it should say it. An NLU system can typically start with an arbitrary piece of text, but an NLG system begins with a well-controlled, Chat GPT detailed picture of the world. If you give an idea to an NLG system, the system synthesizes and transforms that idea into a sentence. It uses a combinatorial process of analytic output and contextualized outputs to complete these tasks. While natural language understanding focuses on computer reading comprehension, natural language generation enables computers to write.

Another difference is that NLP breaks and processes language, while NLU provides language comprehension. NLU can be used in many different ways, including understanding dialogue between two people, understanding how someone feels about a particular situation, and other similar scenarios. Hiren is CTO at Simform with an extensive experience in helping enterprises and startups streamline their business performance through data-driven innovation.

Natural language processing works by taking unstructured text and converting it into a correct format or a structured text. It works by building the algorithm and training the model on large amounts of data analyzed to understand what the user means when they say something. Natural language processing primarily focuses on syntax, which deals with the structure and organization of language.

Language is deeply intertwined with culture, and direct translations often fail to convey the intended meaning, especially when idiomatic expressions or culturally specific references are involved. NLU and NLP technologies address these challenges by going beyond mere word-for-word translation. They analyze the context and cultural nuances of language to provide translations that are both linguistically accurate and culturally appropriate.

Top 5 Expectations Concerning the Future of Conversational AI

Current systems are prone to bias and incoherence, and occasionally behave erratically. Despite the challenges, machine learning engineers have many opportunities to apply NLP in ways that are ever more central to a functioning society. In this case, the person’s objective is to purchase tickets, and the ferry is the most likely form of travel as the campground is on an island. Ecommerce websites rely heavily on sentiment analysis of the reviews and feedback from the users—was a review positive, negative, or neutral? Here, they need to know what was said and they also need to understand what was meant. But before any of this natural language processing can happen, the text needs to be standardized.

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) are both critical research topics in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field. However, NLU is to extract the core semantic meaning from the given utterances, while NLG is the opposite, of which the goal is to construct corresponding sentences based on the given semantics. In addition, NLP allows the use and understanding of human languages by computers. As humans, we can identify such underlying similarities almost effortlessly and respond accordingly. But this is a problem for machines—any algorithm will need the input to be in a set format, and these three sentences vary in their structure and format. And if we decide to code rules for each and every combination of words in any natural language to help a machine understand, then things will get very complicated very quickly.

In this section, we will introduce the top 10 use cases, of which five are related to pure NLP capabilities and the remaining five need for NLU to assist computers in efficiently automating these use cases. Figure 4 depicts our sample of 5 use cases in which businesses should favor NLP over NLU or vice versa.

It’s concerned with the ability of computers to comprehend and extract meaning from human language. It involves developing systems and models that can accurately interpret and understand the intentions, nlu and nlp entities, context, and sentiment expressed in text or speech. However, NLU techniques employ methods such as syntactic parsing, semantic analysis, named entity recognition, and sentiment analysis.

The latest boom has been the popularity of representation learning and deep neural network style machine learning methods since 2010. These methods have been shown to achieve state-of-the-art results for many natural language tasks. AI technologies enable companies to track feedback far faster than they could with humans monitoring the systems and extract information in multiple languages without large amounts of work and training.

They improve the accuracy, scalability and performance of NLP, NLU and NLG technologies. In addition to natural language understanding, natural language generation is another crucial part of NLP. While NLU is responsible for interpreting human language, NLG focuses on generating human-like language from structured and unstructured data. As a result, algorithms search for associations and correlations to infer what the sentence’s most likely meaning is rather than understanding the genuine meaning of human languages. One of the primary goals of NLU is to teach machines how to interpret and understand language inputted by humans. NLU leverages AI algorithms to recognize attributes of language such as sentiment, semantics, context, and intent.

Rasa NLU is an open-source NLU framework with a Python library for building natural language understanding models. Google Cloud NLU is a powerful tool that offers a range of NLU capabilities, including entity recognition, sentiment analysis, and content classification. These models have achieved groundbreaking results in natural language understanding and are widely used across various domains.

DST is essential at this stage of the dialogue system and is responsible for multi-turn conversations. Then, a dialogue policy determines what next step the dialogue system makes based on the current state. Finally, the NLG gives a response based on the semantic frame.Now that we’ve seen how a typical dialogue system works, let’s clearly understand NLP, NLU, and NLG in detail. NLP stands for neuro-linguistic programming, and it is a type of training that helps people learn how to change the way they think and communicate in order to achieve their goals. One of the main challenges is to teach AI systems how to interact with humans.