Get a personal tour through NLP with our resident expert, Marsal Gavaldà! The video above will give you a peek into the world of natural language processing by examining one of Bruce Springsteen’s greatest hits.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Very often we get asked the question, “what is NLP?” Let me try to give a quick answer. NLP, natural language processing, or actually NLU, natural language understanding, is the set of methodologies and techniques that allow for a computer to make sense of human language. Human language meaning English, Swahili, Chinese; whatever language you speak, as opposed to a computer language, a programming language. So it’s the process of analyzing these words and then trying to extract the meaning. For example, if I’m interfacing with an MP3 player I can say, “can you play me a song by Bruce Springsteen where he complains about having to drive his girlfriend’s mother?” Understanding this full sentence means that we have to understand the key part in this case is “play,” and that play is a verb as opposed to another example where “I want to see a play,” and play is a noun. The context is important, which is why it’s difficult for computers to do this process, it’s much easier for humans because as we learn, we interact with the world and we subconsciously develop a way to disambiguate and to not get confused by whether “play” is being used as a verb or as a noun.
So what is the song by Bruce Springsteen where he complains about having to drive his girlfriend’s mom? Well, it turns out it’s “Sherry Darling.” The interesting part is that if you have access to all the lyrics, it’s not super complicated to have a good indexing of those lyrics and then being able to answer and find the most relevant answers to questions like “which song is the one where something happens?” It’s interesting because many times we remember the content of the song, and we don’t necessarily remember the title of the song, so it’s quite useful to be able to go deeper and index all the lyrics. This is something that is very doable using the MindMeld API, where you can just crawl a website. We internally create our custom knowledge graph and then make it very easy to have a voice-driven interface to this content, voice-driven search and discovery. So you could actually crawl a website with lyrics and then ask this question about this song by Bruce Springsteen where he has to drive his girlfriend’s mother and you would say “play” and it would start playing.
