Unit 3 &Unit 4

Natural Language Processing

Introduction
 Humans communicate through some form of language either by text or speech.
 To make interactions between computers and humans, computers need to understand
natural languages used by humans.
 Natural language processing is all about making computers learn, understand, analyze,
manipulate and interpret natural(human) languages.
 NLP stands for Natural Language Processing, which is a part of Computer Science, Human
languages or Linguistics, and Artificial Intelligence.
 Processing of Natural Language is required when you want an intelligent system like robot
to perform as per your instructions, when you want to hear decisions from a dialogue based
clinical expert system, etc.
 The ability of machines to interpret human language is now at the core of many applications
that we use every day - chatbots, Email classification and spam filters, search engines,
grammar checkers, voice assistants, and social language translators.  The input and
output of an NLP system can be Speech or Written Text.

Applications of NLP or Use cases of NLP

1. Sentiment analysis
 Sentiment analysis, also referred to as opinion mining, is an approach to natural language
processing (NLP) that identifies the emotional tone behind a body of text.
 This is a popular way for organizations to determine and categorize opinions about a
product, service or idea.
 Sentiment analysis systems help organizations gather insights into real-time customer
sentiment, customer experience and brand reputation.
 Generally, these tools use text analytics to analyze online sources such as emails, blog
posts, online reviews, news articles, survey responses, case studies, web chats, tweets,
forums and comments.
 Sentiment analysis uses machine learning models to perform text analysis of human
language. The metrics used are designed to detect whether the overall sentiment of a
piece of text is positive, negative or neutral.
2. Machine Translation
 Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT, is a sub-field of
computational linguistics that investigates the use of software to translate text or speech
from one language to another.
 On a basic level, MT performs mechanical substitution of words in one language for
words in another, but that alone rarely produces a good translation because recognition of
whole phrases and their closest counterparts in the target language is needed.
  Not all words in one language have equivalent words in another language, and many
words have more than one meaning.
 Solving this problem with corpus statistical and neural techniques is a rapidly growing
field that is leading to better translations, handling differences in linguistic typology,
translation of idioms, and the isolation of anomalies.
 Corpus: A collection of written texts, especially the entire works of a particular author.

3. Text Extraction
 There are a number of natural language processing techniques that can be used to extract
information from text or unstructured data.
 These techniques can be used to extract information such as entity names, locations,
quantities, and more.
 With the help of natural language processing, computers can make sense of the vast
amount of unstructured text data that is generated every day, and humans can reap the
benefits of having this information readily available.
 Industries such as healthcare, finance, and e-commerce are already using natural language
processing techniques to extract information and improve business processes.
 As the machine learning technology continues to develop, we will only see more and more
information extraction use cases covered.
4. Text Classification
 Unstructured text is everywhere, such as emails, chat conversations, websites, and social
media. Nevertheless, it’s hard to extract value from this data unless it’s organized in a certain
way.
 Text classification also known as text tagging or text categorization is the process of
categorizing text into organized groups. By using Natural Language Processing
(NLP), text classifiers can automatically analyze text and then assign a set of pre-defined
tags or categories based on its content.
 Text classification is becoming an increasingly important part of business as it allows to
easily get insights from data and automate business processes.

5. Speech Recognition
 Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and
computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the
recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers.
 It is also known as automatic speech recognition (ASR), computer speech recognition
or speech to text (STT).
 It incorporates knowledge and research in the computer science,
linguistics and computer engineering fields. The reverse process is speech synthesis.
Speech recognition use cases
 A wide number of industries are utilizing different applications of speech technology
today, helping businesses and consumers save time and even lives. Some examples
include:
  Automotive: Speech recognizers improve driver safety by enabling voice-activated
navigation systems and search capabilities in car radios.
 Technology: Virtual agents are increasingly becoming integrated within our daily lives,
particularly on our mobile devices. We use voice commands to access them through our
smartphones, such as through Google Assistant or Apple’s Siri, for tasks, such as voice
search, or through our speakers, via Amazon’s Alexa or Microsoft’s Cortana, to play
music. They’ll only continue to integrate into the everyday products that we use, fueling
the “Internet of Things” movement.
 Healthcare: Doctors and nurses leverage dictation applications to capture and log patient
diagnoses and treatment notes.
 Sales: Speech recognition technology has a couple of applications in sales. It can help a
call center transcribe thousands of phone calls between customers and agents to identify
common call patterns and issues. AI chatbots can also talk to people via a webpage,
answering common queries and solving basic requests without needing to wait for a
contact center agent to be available. In both instances speech recognition systems help
reduce time to resolution for consumer issues.
6. Chatbot
 Chatbots are computer programs that conduct automatic conversations with people.
They are mainly used in customer service for information acquisition. As the name
implies, these are bots designed with the purpose of chatting and are also simply referred
to as “bots.”
 You’ll come across chatbots on business websites or messengers that give pre-scripted
replies to your questions. As the entire process is automated, bots can provide quick
assistance 24/7 without human intervention.
7. Email Filter
 One of the most fundamental and essential applications of NLP online is email filtering.
It began with spam filters, which identified specific words or phrases that indicate a
spam message. But, like early NLP adaptations, filtering has been improved.
 Gmail's email categorization is one of the more common, newer implementations of
NLP. Based on the contents of emails, the algorithm determines whether they belong in
one of three categories (main, social, or promotional).
 This maintains your inbox manageable for all Gmail users, with critical, relevant emails
you want to see and reply to fast.
8. Search Autocorrect and Autocomplete
 When you type 2-3 letters into Google to search for anything, it displays a list of
probable search keywords. Alternatively, if you search for anything with mistakes, it
corrects them for you while still returning relevant results. Isn't it incredible?
 Everyone uses Google search autocorrect autocomplete on a regular basis but seldom
gives it any thought. It's a fantastic illustration of how natural language processing is
touching millions of people across the world, including you and me.
 Both, search autocomplete and autocorrect make it much easier to locate accurate
results.
Components of NLP
There are two components of NLP, Natural Language Understanding (NLU)and Natural
Language Generation (NLG).
 Natural Language Understanding (NLU) which involves transforming humanlanguage
into a machine-readable format.It helps the machine to understand and analyze human
language by extracting the text from large data such as keywords, emotions, relations,
and semantics.
 Natural Language Generation (NLG) acts as a translator that converts thecomputerized
data into natural language representation. It mainly involves Text planning, Sentence
planning, and Text realization.
 The NLU is harder than NLG.

Steps in NLP
There are five general steps :
1. Lexical Analysis
2. Syntactic Analysis (Parsing)
3. Semantic Analysis
4. Discourse Integration
5. Pragmatic Analysis

1. Lexical Analysis:
 The first phase of NLP is the Lexical Analysis.
 This phase scans the source code as a stream of characters and converts it into
meaningful lexemes.
  It divides the whole text into paragraphs, sentences, and words.
 Lexeme: A lexeme is a basic unit of meaning. In linguistics, the abstract unit of
morphological analysis that corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word is called
lexeme.
 The way in which a lexeme is used in a sentence is determined by its grammatical
category.
 Lexeme can be individual word or multiword.
For example, the word talk is an example of an individual word lexeme, which may
have many grammatical variants like talks, talked and talking.
Multiword lexeme can be made up of more than one orthographic word. For example,
speak up, pull through, etc. are the examples of multiword lexemes.
2. Syntax Analysis (Parsing)
 Syntactic Analysis is used to check grammar, word arrangements, and shows the
relationship among the words.
 The sentence such as “The school goes to boy” is rejected by English syntactic
analyzer.

3. Semantic Analysis
 Semantic analysis is concerned with the meaning representation.
 It mainly focuses on the literal meaning of words, phrases, and sentences.
 The semantic analyzer disregards sentence such as “hot ice-cream”.
 Another Example is “Manhattan calls out to Dave” passes a syntactic analysis
because it’s a grammatically correct sentence. However, it fails a semantic analysis.
Because Manhattan is a place (and can’t literally call out to people), the sentence’s
meaning doesn’t make sense.

4. Discourse Integration
 Discourse Integration depends upon the sentences that precedes it and also invokes
the meaning of the sentences that follow it.
 For instance, if one sentence reads, “Manhattan speaks to all its people,” and the
following sentence reads, “It calls out to Dave,” discourse integration checks the
first sentence for context to understand that “It” in the latter sentence refers to
Manhattan.

5. Pragmatic Analysis
 During this, what was said is re-interpreted on what it meant.
 It involves deriving those aspects of language which require real world knowledge.
For instance, a pragmatic analysis can uncover the intended meaning of “Manhattan
speaks to all its people.” Methods like neural networks assess the context to understand
that the sentence isn’t literal, and most people won’t interpret it as such.
  A pragmatic analysis deduces that this sentence is a metaphor for how people
emotionally connect with place.

Recursive Neural Networks

Recursive Neural Networks are a type of neural network architecture that is specially designed to
process hierarchical structures and capture dependencies within recursively structured data. Unlike
traditional feedforward neural networks (RNNs),
Recursive Neural Networks or RvNN can efficiently handle tree-structured inputs which makes
them suitable for tasks involving nested and hierarchical relationships. In this article, we will
discuss RvNN, its work principles, and some frequently asked questions.

Working Principals of RvNN

Some of the key-working principles of RvNN are discussed below:
1. Recursive Structure Handling: RvNN is designed to handle recursive structures which
means it can naturally process hierarchical relationships in data by combining information
from child nodes to form representations for parent nodes.
2. Parameter Sharing: RvNN often uses shared parameters across different levels of the
hierarchy which enables the model to generalize well and learn from various parts of the
input structure.
3. Tree Traversal: RvNN traverses the tree structure in a bottom-up or top-down manner by
simultaneously updating node representations based on the information gathered from their
children.
4. Composition Function: The composition function in RvNN combines information from
child nodes to create a representation for the parent node. This function is crucial in
capturing the hierarchical relationships within the data.
Difference between Recursive Neural Network and CNN
Both the RvNN and CNN belong to neural network family. However, they differ significantly
which are discussed below:

Difference Facts RvNN CNN

It primarily used for grid-

It is designed to process hierarchical
structured data like images,
or tree-structured data, capturing
Structure where convolutional layers
dependencies within recursively
are applied to local receptive
structured information.
fields.

It processes data in a recursive It uses convolutional layers

manner, combining information to extract local features and
Processing Mechanism
from child nodes to form spatial hierarchies from input
representations for parent nodes. data.

It is suitable for tasks involving It excels in tasks related to

nested structures like natural computer vision, image
Applications
language parsing or molecular recognition and other grid-
structure analysis. based data.

Best suited neural network models for recursive data

There are several popular neural network models which are widely used for handling recursive
data. Some models are discussed below:
 Recursive Neural Network (RvNN): This is already discussed in the article. This model
is specifically designed for processing tree-structured data, capturing dependencies within
nested or hierarchical relationships.
 Tree-LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory): It is an extension of the
traditional LSTM architecture, adapted to handle tree structures more effectively.
 Graph Neural Networks (GNNs): This model is particularly designed for processing
graph-structured data, which includes recursive structures. GNNs are particularly useful
for tasks involving relationships between entities.
Now, choosing best model is fully depends on which task we are performing. For simple recursive
data where no extensive complex pattern is there and limited machine resources are in concern
then the best model is Recursive Neural Network (RNN). Similarly, if there are more complex
patterns and messy graph-like data is there then we need to opt for GNN or tree-LSTM. However,
GNN requires GPU otherwise execution will take deadly high time.
Difference between RvNN and RNN
RNN and RvNN both belong to the family of Neural Network, but they differ significantly. Some
of the differences are discussed below:

Differencing facts RNN RvNN

It is designed for sequential It is specially designed to

Data Structure data like time series or tailor for hierarchical data
sequences of words. structures like trees.

It processes sequences by It processes hierarchical

maintaining hidden states structures by recursively
Processing Mechanism
which capture temporal combining information from
dependencies. child nodes.

Commonly used in
Commonly used in tasks like applications which involves
natural language processing, hierarchical relationships like
Applications
speech recognition and time parsing in NLP, analyzing
series prediction. molecular structures or image
segmentation.

It has linear topology where It has a tree-like or

information flows hierarchical topology which
Topology
sequentially through time allows them to capture nested
steps. relationships within the data.
Image segmentation
Image segmentation is a computer vision technique that divides an image into distinct regions or
segments. The goal is to extract features and analyze the image data.

Image segmentation is used in a variety of applications, including:

 Medical imaging
Detects and labels pixels that represent tumors in a patient's brain or other organs.

 Autonomous driving
Helps self-driving cars understand their surroundings by identifying roads, people, other
vehicles, and obstacles.

 Radiotherapy
Helps identify the treatment target and the normal structures to be avoided during irradiation.

Image segmentation can be performed using a variety of techniques, including: region-based,

edge-based, threshold-based, and feature-based clustering.

There are different types of image segmentation, including:

 Semantic segmentation: Classifies each pixel based on its semantic class.

 Instance segmentation: Assigns unique labels to different instances, even if they are of
the same semantic class.
 Panoptic segmentation: Combines semantic and instance segmentation, providing both
class-level and instance-level labels

Attention mechanisms are a powerful technique for enhancing the performance of deep neural
networks in computer vision tasks, such as image classification, object detection, and scene
understanding. They allow the model to focus on the most relevant features of the input and ignore
the irrelevant ones, improving the accuracy and efficiency of the learning process.
Dynamic Memory Network (DMN)
It is a neural network architecture optimized for question-answering (Q&A) problems. It’s a new
way of natural language processing, NLP.
Given a training set of input sequences (knowledge) and questions, it can form episodic memories
and use them to generate relevant answers and we will make a chatbot out of it. To put it simply,
the way we build the chatbots is to provide a series of input sentences and ask a question based on
that sentences and it’s gonna output the answer. Interesting huh!
Just to be clear, check the following examples…
INPUT: There is a cat. Cat is black
Query: Which colour is the cat?
OUTPUT: black

Recent research in NLP using Deep Learning

Natural language processing (NLP) is a theory-motivated range of computational techniques for
the automatic analysis and representation of human language. NLP research has evolved from the
era of punch cards and batch processing, in which the analysis of a sentence could take up to 7
minutes, to the era of Google and the likes of it, in which millions of webpages can be processed
in less than a second.
NLP enables computers to perform a wide range of natural language related tasks at all levels,
ranging from parsing and part-of-speech (POS) tagging to machine translation and dialogue
systems.
Deep learning architecture and algorithms have already made impressive advances in fields such
as computer vision and pattern recognition. Following this trend, recent NLP research is now
increasingly focusing on the use of new deep learning methods. For decades, machine learning
approaches targeting NLP problems have been based on shallow models (e.g., SVM and logistic
regression) trained on very high dimensional and sparse features.
In the last few years, neural networks based on dense vector representations have been producing
superior results on various NLP tasks. This trend is sparked by the success of word embeddings
and deep learning methods .
Deep learning enables multi-level automatic feature representation learning. In contrast, traditional
machine learning based NLP systems liaise heavily on hand-crafted features. Such hand-crafted
features are time-consuming and often incomplete.