NLP vs NLU vs. NLG: the differences between three natural language processing concepts

nlu and nlp

When an unfortunate incident occurs, customers file a claim to seek compensation. As a result, insurers should take into account the emotional context of the claims processing. As a result, if insurance companies choose to automate claims processing with chatbots, they must be certain of the chatbot’s emotional and NLU skills.

Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised businesses on their enterprise software, automation, cloud, AI / ML and other technology related decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem’s work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.

Definition & principles of natural language processing (NLP)

Still, it can also enhance several existing technologies, often without a complete ‘rip and replace’ of legacy systems. Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is one of the most talked about technologies of the modern era. We’ve seen that NLP primarily deals with analyzing the language’s structure and form, focusing on aspects like grammar, word formation, and punctuation. On the other hand, NLU is concerned with comprehending the deeper meaning and intention behind the language. Semantic analysis, the core of NLU, involves applying computer algorithms to understand the meaning and interpretation of words and is not yet fully resolved. GLUE and its superior SuperGLUE are the most widely used benchmarks to evaluate the performance of a model on a collection of tasks, instead of a single task in order to maintain a general view on the NLU performance.

nlu and nlp

But there’s another way AI and all these processes can help you scale content. You’re the one creating content for Bloomberg, or CNN Money, or even a brokerage firm. You’ve done your content marketing research and determined that daily reports on the stock market’s performance could increase traffic to your site. It takes your question and breaks it down into understandable pieces – “stock market” and “today” being keywords on which it focuses.

Get started with conversational AI

Twilio’s Programmable Voice API follows natural language processing steps to build compelling, scalable voice experiences for your customers. Try it for free to customize your speech-to-text solutions with add-on NLP-driven features, like interactive voice response and speech recognition, that streamline everyday tasks. NLP is a subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence that uses 5 NLP processing steps to gain insights from large volumes of text—without needing to process it all.

NLP and NLU have unique strengths and applications as mentioned above, but their true power lies in their combined use. Integrating both technologies allows AI systems to process and understand natural language more accurately. Natural language understanding is a sub-field of NLP that enables computers to grasp and interpret human language in all its complexity. However, the grammatical correctness or incorrectness does not always correlate with the validity of a phrase.

NLG systems enable computers to automatically generate natural language text, mimicking the way humans naturally communicate — a departure from traditional computer-generated text. When given a natural language nlu and nlp input, NLU splits that input into individual words — called tokens — which include punctuation and other symbols. The tokens are run through a dictionary that can identify a word and its part of speech.

nlu and nlp

The key challenge for most companies is to find out what will propel their businesses moving forward. The terms might look like alphabet spaghetti but each is a separate concept. In fact, NLP includes NLU and NLG concepts to achieve human-like processing.

Contents

Finding one right for you involves knowing a little about their work and what they can do. To help you on the way, here are seven chatbot use cases to improve customer experience. 86% of consumers say good customer service can take them from first-time buyers to brand advocates. While excellent customer service is an essential focus of any successful brand, forward-thinking companies are forming customer-focused multidisciplinary teams to help create exceptional customer experiences.

nlu and nlp

Sentiment analysis and intent identification are not necessary to improve user experience if people tend to use more conventional sentences or expose a structure, such as multiple choice questions. While natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU), and natural language generation (NLG) are all related topics, they are distinct ones. Given how they intersect, they are commonly confused within conversation, but in this post, we’ll define each term individually and summarize their differences to clarify any ambiguities. Semantics describe the meaning of words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. Semantic analysis attempts to understand the literal meaning of individual language selections, not syntactic correctness. However, a semantic analysis doesn’t check language data before and after a selection to clarify its meaning.