Natural language processing (NLP) is revolutionizing the field of data science. As AI systems become more adept at understanding and generating human language, new doors are opening for analyzing and deriving value from textual data.
A data scientist course equips students with natural language processing skills to unlock insights from textual data, strengthening analysis capabilities beyond structured data alone. This allows expansion into new domains by leveraging the rich information contained within unstructured text.
In this blog, we’ll explore some of the key ways NLP is advancing data science and enabling new applications.
Tapping into Unstructured Data
Much of the world’s data comes in the form of unstructured text – emails, documents, social media posts, surveys, and more. Historically, analyzing this qualitative data has been difficult and time-consuming for data scientists. NLP fundamentally changes that by providing algorithms and statistical models to extract insights, categorize documents, and quantify sentiment.
Instead of manually reading and coding text, NLP allows automated analysis at scale. Some examples: sentiment analysis classifies emotions and opinions within textual data, named entity recognition identifies people/places/organizations, topic modeling unveils hidden semantic structures, and natural language generation creates synthetic text from data.
By unlocking unstructured data, NLP dramatically expands the volume, variety and veracity of data available for modeling. This opens new avenues for predicting consumer behavior, personalized content, improved products, and more tailored customer experiences.
Augmenting Human Understanding
A persistent challenge in data science is facilitating human interpretation of analytical findings and complex machine learning models. Algorithms like neural networks can seem impenetrable “black boxes” to end users. This is where NLP bridges the gap.
NLP enables natural language interfaces for describing data insights, metrics, and recommendations in an intuitive way for stakeholders and executives. Systems powered by NLP can generate automated summaries of key takeaways, translate technical jargon into plain language, and explain the rationale behind predictions.
Instead of staring at spreadsheets or deciphering intricate decision trees, users can simply have a conversation with an AI assistant or read a customized report in natural language. NLP becomes critical for augmenting human understanding across organizations.
Finding Signals in Noise
Real-world data is often noisy with biases, errors, and anomalies that distort analysis. Data scientists spend substantial amounts of time on data cleaning and preprocessing to ensure quality inputs. Text data is especially vulnerable to noise.
Between spelling mistakes, ambiguity, sarcasm, complex syntax, and domain-specific terminology, extracting insights from text corpora can be an arduous process. This is where NLP techniques shine by providing an array of noise reduction capabilities.
Text normalization handles spelling corrections, grammatical errors, abbreviations, and improper punctuation to clean documents. Stopword removal gets rid of non-contextual words like “and”, “the”, and “but” to spotlight key terms. Parts-of-speech tagging labels words by function to parse verbs, nouns, and modifiers.
Lexical analysis scans for word correlations and semantic similarities to cluster-related concepts and expands query understanding. Together these NLP data-cleansing fundamentals parse meaningful signals from noisy text.
Beyond cleaning, NLP also offers subject matter expertise for adding context. Sentiment analysis of social conversations related to brands seems noisy on the surface, but NLP models trained specifically on consumer slang, emojis, and online vernacular can accurately contextualize attitudes and emotions.
Building Pipelines
A best practice in data science is structuring and encoding unstructured data to facilitate downstream analytics and modeling. This allows qualitative inputs like text to integrate cleanly with structured databases and big data infrastructure. However, manually converting unstructured corpora to standardized formats does not scale.
This is where NLP provides automation to create full end-to-end pipelines that ingest large volumes of text documents and web content then programmatically output structured, encoded data ready for querying and analysis.
Through tokenization, texts get broken into semantic units like words, phrases, or symbols. Lemmatization reduces words to their base form, enabling aggregation by concept rather than getting fragmented across multiple surface forms. Vectorization encodes text into high-dimensional numeric representations to input into machine learning models.
Tools like Apache OpenNLP, spaCy, and Stanford CoreNLP provide these NLP foundations so data scientists don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Pre-training universal language representation models like BERT on huge general text corpora also allows models to develop a broad linguistic understanding for then transferring and fine-tuning to more specialized domains.
Democratizing Development
Historically, developing NLP applications required specialized linguistic and technical expertise. Modern transfer learning techniques empower developers without an NLP background by simplifying workflows utilizing intuitive APIs and libraries for plug-and-play capabilities.
Pre-built embedding algorithms, text classifiers, and sequence models can quickly extract entities, analyze sentiment, summarize passages, translate text, and transcribe speech without reinventing foundational NLP. While NLP may never become fully automated, adapting pre-existing NLP models is significantly more accessible.
Transfer learning democratizes development so text analytics can expand to new domains and use cases – bringing the power of language understanding to a wider range of applications.
Driving Business Value
Beyond academic research, NLP is recognized as a competitive advantage across industries. Analyzing customer feedback, call center logs, emails, and other text data reveals tangible product and service improvements that impact the bottom line.
As customers expect more personalized, conversational experiences, NLP powers chatbots, recommendation engines, and search relevancy. For developing consumer insights, branding, advertising, and new offerings, understanding public sentiment and trends shared in online text data is invaluable. Both as a technology and a skill set, implementing NLP unlocks business value.
The Road Ahead
As models continue learning the intricacies of human language, NLP will become further cemented as an essential pillar of the data science toolkit – not just a niche specialization. Text data contains rich details about human psychology, culture, history, and behavior. Unlocking these insights is how NLP will transform industries.
Meaningful patterns within the natural language can shape medicine, economics, public policy, technology, and more. NLP allows data scientists to uncover key information for predicting disease outbreaks based on social media posts, optimizing urban planning decisions by analyzing citizen input, informing public policy stances by tracking constituent opinions and so much more.
Human language has evolved over millennia to convey abstract, nuanced perspectives. As AI reaches new heights emulating this versatile form of communication, the doors will continue opening wider for pioneering text analytics applications across sectors, geographic regions and languages.
NLP sits at the frontier, moving beyond words to uncover ideas and enable data science breakthroughs that will define the 21st century.
