10 Most Used NLP Techniques for Data-Science

In this rapidly developing world, consumption of data is increasing at an alarming rate. A large
portion of this data available today is in the form of text. Natural Language Processing or NLP
is a popular branch of AI which helps Data Science in extracting insights from the textual data.
Following this, Industry experts have predicted that there will be a huge demand for Natural
Language Processing professionals in the near future. Everything we speak or express holds
great information and can be useful in making valuable decisions. But extracting this information
is not that easy as humans can use multiple languages, words, tones, etc. All these data that we
are generating through our conversations, tweets in our day-to-day life is highly in unstructured
manner. The traditional techniques used before were not capable of extracting insights from this
data. But thanks to the advanced technologies like NLP that have brought a revolution in the
field of Data Science. In this comprehensive article, we will discuss and dive deep into the ten
most used NLP Techniques in the field of Data Science.
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What is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?

Natural Language Processing or NLP is defined as the automatic manipulation of natural
languages, like speech and text, by using software that helps computers to observe, analyze,
understand, and derive valuable meaning from natural or human spoken languages. In other
words, it is a branch that focuses on teaching computers how to read and interpret the text in
the same way as humans do. It is a field that is developing methodologies for filling the gap
between Data Science and human languages. NLP applications are difficult and challenging
during development as computers require humans to interact with them using programming
languages like Java, Python, etc., which are structured and unambiguous. But human spoken
languages are ambiguous and change with regional or social change, hence it becomes
challenging to train computers to understand natural languages.
Let’s now dive deep and understand the ten most used NLP Techniques in Data Science.

1. Tokenization in NLP
Tokenization is one of the NLP techniques that segments the entire text into sentences and
words. In other words, we can say that it is a process of dividing the text into segments called
tokens. This process discards certain characters like punctuations, hyphens, etc. The main
purpose of tokenization is to convert the text into a format that is more convenient for analysis.
Let’s understand this with the help of an example.
In this case, it was quite simple as we have split and classified it into blank spaces. The problem
with tokenization is the removal of punctuations. Sometimes it may lead to complications. For
example, in Mr., the period following the abbreviation should be a part of the same token and
should not be removed, but tokenization splits it into two words. Because of this, a large number
of problems arise while applying tokenization to biomedical text domains having a number of
hyphens, parentheses, and punctuations.

2. Stemming and Lemmatization

The main objective of Stemming in NLP is to reduce the words to their root form. Stemming
technique works on the principle that certain kind of words having slightly different spellings but
having the same meaning should be placed in the same token. In stemming the affixes are
removed for efficient processing.

In Lemmatization, we convert the words into lemma which is the dictionary form of the word.
For example, “Hates”, “hating” are forms of the word “hate”. So “hate” will be the lemma for
these words. Lemmatization technique aims at converting the different forms of a word to their
root form and group them together. The aim of stemming and lemmatization is quite similar but
the approaches are different.

Let’s understand the both approaches with an example.

3. Stop Words Removal
In Stop Words Removal technique, the common words which occur most frequently but adds a
very little or no value to the result are automatically removed from the text. This helps to free up
space and improve performance and processing time. The main purpose of using this technique
is to minimize the noise so that we can focus on the words holding important meaning during
the analysis. For example, the common prepositions like and, the, a, of the English language
can be removed. This technique is not much preferred in analysis as sometimes some important
information is lost in this method.
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4. Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF).

TF or Term frequency measures the frequency of a word in a given document. This is
calculated by counting the total number of occurrences of the word and dividing it by the total
length of the document i.e - TF=Total occurrences/Total length of the document.

IDF or Inverse Document Frequency assigns a weight to any string according to its
importance. It calculates it by taking the log of the total number of documents in the dataset
present at that time divided by the number of documents containing that particular word. TF-IDF
is the importance of any word by multiplying the TF and IDF terms i.e TF*IDF.

Thus by this method, the words having more importance are assigned higher weights by using
these statistics. TF-IDF technique is mostly used by search engines for scoring and ranking the
relevance of any document according to the given input keywords.
5. Keyword Extraction in NLP
Keyword extraction is a text analysis technique that automatically extracts the most used and
most important words and expressions from a given text. It helps summarize the content of texts
and recognize the main topics discussed.

It finds keywords from all texts i.e- regular documents and business reports, tweets, social
media comments, online forums and reviews, news reports, and many more. By using Keyword
Extraction technique we can automatically see what our customers are mentioning most often
on the internet, saving the teams hours upon hours of manual processing using traditional
methods.

As more than 80% of the data generated every day is unstructured, making it extremely difficult
to analyze and process – businesses need automated keyword extraction to help them process
and analyze customer data in a more efficient manner.

6. Word Embeddings.
Word Embeddings in NLP is a technique of representing the words of a document in the form
of numbers. It should be represented in a way that similar words have a similar representation.
It is a technique where individual words of a domain or language are represented as real-valued
vectors in a lower dimensional space. It is this approach to representing words and documents
that may be considered one of the key breakthroughs of deep learning on challenging natural
language processing problems. Each word is represented by a real-valued vector, often tens or
hundreds of dimensions.
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7. Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment Analysis is a machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) technique
used to examine the emotional tone conveyed by the user in any piece of text or sentence. It is
the process of gathering and analyzing people’s opinions, thoughts, and impressions regarding
various topics, products, subjects, and services. People’s opinions can be beneficial to
corporations, governments, and individuals for collecting information and making decisions
based on opinions and act accordingly. The emotional tone or the feedback here could be
positive, negative, or, neutral.

Businesses use sentiment analysis tools such as to assess the sentiment value of their brands,
goods, or services. Customer feedback analysis is one of the most used applications of
sentiment analysis. Customers’ emotions/sentiments can be analyzed and evaluated using the
sentiment analysis software.

There are total 5 types of Sentiment Analysis techniques used in NLP:

1. Emotion Detection Sentiment Analysis

2. Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis
3. Fine-Grained Sentiment Analysis
4. Multilingual Sentiment Analysis
5. Intent Sentiment Analysis

8. Topic modeling
Topic Modeling is a technique in NLP that extracts important topics from the given text or
document. It works on the assumption that each document is a group of topics and each topic is
a group of words. We can relate it with the Dimensionality Reduction.
Firstly the user defines the number of topics a document should have. The algorithm will then
divide the document into topics in such a way that the topics should include all the words in the
document. The algorithm then iteratively assigns the words to any topic based on its probability
of belonging to that topic and the probability that it can regenerate the document from those
topics. This is useful because extracting the words from a document takes more time and is
much more complex than extracting them from topics present in the document.

9. Text Summarization.
Text summarization is a very useful and important part of Natural Language Processing (NLP).
It is used to build algorithms or programs which will reduce the text size and create a summary
of our text data. This is called automatic text summarization in machine learning. Text
summarization takes an input of a sequence of words i.e- the input article and returns an output
of words i.e- the summary. Such models are called sequence-to-sequence models. Text
summarization can be a useful case study in domains like financial research, question-answer
bots, media monitoring, social media marketing, and so on.

10. Named Entity Recognition.

Named entity recognition technique in NLP is the task of identifying and categorizing key
information (entities) in text. An entity can be any word or series of words that consistently refers
to the same thing. Every detected entity is classified into a predetermined category. The Named
Entity Recognition API works behind the scene to identify and spot the relevant entities in this
search. This speeds up the search process as all the relevant tags are stored together and
highlighted.
The Named Entity Recognition technique is a two-step process:
1. Detect a named entity.
2. Categorize the entity.

Real Life NLP Case Study.

 Many e-commerce businesses are using Klevu, a smart search provider based on NLP for
providing a better customer experience. This smart search provider automatically learns
from the user interactions in the store. It performs many functions like search autocomplete,
the addition of relevant contextual synonyms, etc. It also uses the insights gained from the
textual data for providing personalized search recommendations.

 Mastercard launched its Chat-bot on Facebook Messenger Application. The aim of this
chat-bot was to provide customer support services like an overview of their spending
habits, available benefits, reminders by analyzing their data. This helped them to provide a
better customer experience. This initiative of chat-bot resulted in saving their expenses of
developing a separate app for customer support.

 Recently, many business intelligence units and analytic vendors have started to add NLP
capabilities to their product offerings. Natural language understanding and Natural
language generation are being used for natural language searches and data visualization
narration, respectively.

 Uber also launched its messenger bot on Facebook Messenger Application. The aim was
to reach more and more customers for collecting more data and Facebook was the best
possible way to connect people through social media. This bot helped them in providing a
better and personalized customer experience by analyzing the customer data. This bot
provided the users with easy and quick access to the service which eventually helped them
in gaining more users.

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Conclusion
Natural Language Processing plays a very important role in the improvisation of machine-
human interactions. In this article, we have explored many aspects related to NLP such as
its definition, its methods, how it works, real life case study, etc. We have also seen how
different companies are using Data Science and NLP for improving their business. If you
are interested in interacting with computing systems and have programming and linguistic
knowledge, learning, natural language processing is valuable. Due to an increase in data
and the need to interact with computers, the need for natural language processing is
increasing day by day, and various job opportunities are coming into the markets.
Therefore there is a great scope of NLP in the future. NLP has changed the way we interact
with computers and it’ll continue doing so in the future. These AI technologies will be the
underlying force for transformation from data-driven to intelligence-driven endeavors, as
they shape and improve communication technology in the years to come. I hope this article
will help you to have a clear understanding of Natural Language Processing.
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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s)

1. Is NLP Data Science or Artificial Intelligence?

Ans:- Natural Language Processing or NLP is a field of Artificial Intelligence that gives
the machines the ability to read, understand and derive meaning from human languages.

2. Is NLP related to Data Science?

Ans:- NLP is considered as the specific use-case/problem from the general focus which is
machine learning and which in turn is an integral part of Data-Science.

3. Why NLP is important to big data science and analytics?

Ans:- NLP is mainly used to pre-process or filter out the data. Any data scientist or analyst
should follow this step. By this we can say that NLP is part of Data Science.

4.Why NLP is the future?

Ans:- With the increasing amount of text data being generated every day, NLP will only
become more and more important in the future to make sense of the data and used it in
many other applications.

5.Why is NLP difficult?

Ans:- Considering how challenging human language is and how differently each individual
uses it to communicate, NLP has got a long way to go to become fluid, consistent, and
robust.

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