What are examples of NLP applications in business?

Let’s deep dive into some examples of modern business applications of NLP
and see how the technology has transformed these industries and their
operations.

1. Social Media Sentiment Analysis

NLP for social media listening is unique because it understands internet short
forms (LOL, BRB, TL;DR), slangs, code-switching, emoticons and emojis, and
hashtags. No matter what your customers choose to speak, NLP allows you to
extract information from it, and prepare it for an ML model to
ingest. Sentiment analysis further helps you analyze how your brand is doing
based on positive, negative or neutral emotions it finds in your social
mentions. And in this way it gives you actionable insights you can use. You can
reach out to an influencer as part of your marketing strategy, alter your
advertising campaign, improve aspects of your product or service, upscale
your brand reputation, all based on public sentiment derived from social
media monitoring.

2. Patient Voice & Healthcare

Hospitals and healthcare providers are using NLP technology more frequently
now than before, to capture and manage patient notes, and electronic health
records (EHRs). Patient feedback, their waiting room experience, post-surgery
care, opinions and feelings, are all analyzed through AI/ML models using
textual data from in-clinic questionnaires, post-appointment surveys, and
feedback web forms. Patient voice helps them evaluate the quality of their
service and offer a more enhanced patient experience. Learn about wider
applications of NLP applications in healthcare.

3. Language Translation
There is information and knowledge to be found in many sources, but not
everyone can be fluent in multiple languages. That’s why online translations
are a boon for the most part, especially for researchers. And we wouldn’t be
able to enjoy the many foriegn films and documentaries with subtitles on our
video streaming channels, without the NLP technology providing speech to
text translations at scale, so quickly and efficiently. Languages are so beautiful,
so unique, and intricate that linguists are heavily invested in their
morphology, anthropological linguistics, philology, syntax and phonology.
They discover new insights continually, and these insights help data scientists
improve AI/ML models for language translations.

In NLP, there is a task called Sentence Boundary Detection (SBD) that

understands the boundaries of a set of words. It is one of its most fundamental
tasks in translation. That’s why you can translate entire texts in different
languages, and they match sentence by sentence. Google Translation alone is
used by 500 million people to translate documents or text in 100 different
languages. There are numerous other translation apps and websites.

However, because human language is so complex, machine translation still has

a long way to go. Especially in languages that do not use spaces to mark the
end of a word, as in Japanese or Thai. Word boundary detection is an area that
data scientists are still trying to perfect.

4. Text Analytics

Companies use text analytics to gain insights from any and every source of
information that is related to them. This flood of data can be from news, social
media reviews, tweets, online surveys, voice-to-text notes, or any other
source. NLP converts this raw data into meaningful documentation that can be
analyzed by a machine learning algorithm. Semantic Search further helps in
understanding the meaning and intent behind words and phrases. Coupled
with NER, text analytics matches a sentiment to an entity and by doing so lets
you know how a third-party feels about you. This information can provide
actionable insights that you can use for intelligent business decisions.
5. Optical Character Recognition

Raw data that is collected for text analytics can be from emails, invoices,
service agreements, research papers, human resource documents, purchase
orders, and other textual formats. But it can also be sourced from video
formats on various platforms like YouTube, Igtv, Facebook, TikTok or in
images (think Instagram or Pinterest). Natural Language Processing
algorithms use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology for images, as
well as for Video Content Analysis, to understand this image-based data. The
technology converts the scanned file into a text searchable file, and in this way
helps the machine model read the data to derive insights.

6. Aviation

Aircraft maintenance is a very important aspect of the aviation industry.

Almost 60% of repair and overhaul is in fact conducted for civil aviation.
Mechanics in aerospace, and also defense, use NLP to glean information about
specific issues from extensive aircraft manuals. These aircraft maintenance
manuals can sometimes be in different languages as well. Through Semantic
Search, and Named Entity Recognition, mechanics can search and understand
the notes from pilots or other individuals describing the problems they faced
mid-flight.

These notes can be in audio format or handwritten. For handwritten formats,

NLP uses neural networks for handwriting recognition and provides the
information that the user is looking for. AI has revolutionized data diagnostics
so much that Airbus thinks AI/ML enabled control engineering (fault
detection, isolation, and recovery) can address unscheduled aircraft
grounding almost completely by 2025.

7. Automated Trading
In the finance industry, NLP applications in business can be seen in the use of
automated trading. This is when you use a computer program to place a trade
on your behalf. A person can define instructions such as time, price, and
volume into the program, and when the share price corresponds to the value
defined, the program executes its directions and makes the transaction. NLP
can also review news on financial results, mergers and acquisitions, and make
recommendations on which stocks would be a good investment, based on this
data.

8. Automated Phone Systems

When a customer service number at a bank or ticketing system puts you on an

automated phone system, that’s because of NLP. It’s also because of NLP that
we have computer-generated languages that sound just like a human voice.
The technology is based on predefined system rules and uses speech
recognition and interactive voice response (IVR) when it interacts with you.
That’s how it guides you through a transaction, and also gives you the option
of choosing the language you prefer. More and more companies are choosing
to use NLP for customer interaction as it is more convenient, cost effective,
and predictable.
9. Drone and UAV Control System

The aerospace industry uses NLP technology to control drones and unmanned
aerial vehicles (UAV). They use it for real-time path planning, adaptive control,
and obstacle recognition. It is also applied in self-governing planning systems
that use speech recognition and air traffic control language as a base. There is
significant research being conducted in this area through high-fidelity
simulation, especially for adaptive control for uncertain environments.

10. Insurance & Credit Card Fraud Protection

NLP business applications have helped in financial fraud protection

tremendously. Insurance and credit card companies are always alert when it
comes to fraudulent transactions. These companies, especially in the
insurance sector, have huge KYC (know your customer) records, location-
based information, social media information, and user-sentiment big data.
They use NLP technologies to analyze all this data for text and sentiment
analysis.

Text analytics also processes the patterns from a massive chunk of textual
data from insurance applications. It checks for similar claims, similar
circumstances, and creates a knowledge database. This is how it detects
organized fraud by linking common keywords or similar accidents, even if
they are in different locations, and by different claimants. This information not
only helps them dismiss bogus claims, but also process genuine claims faster,
and improve customer satisfaction.

11. Predictive Text

When you want to reply to an email, and let your smartphone finish your
sentence for you with phrases like, “Thanks for letting me know”, or “How are
you?” - that’s NLP. And when you type a word and it gets autocorrected, much
to your chagrin sometimes, that too, is NLP. Autocomplete and predictive text
are both helped by NNs that cluster words together as they try to understand
the semantic meaning of what you’re trying to say. And as a result, help you
complete your sentence.

12. Smart Assistants

NLP enables voice recognition algorithms to recognize words and speech

patterns, and infer meaning from them. You can say the word and get your car
to phone someone, or you can ask Alexa to play you your favorite song. Smart
assistants are in a way, how movies used to show AI would be - a machine and
a human talking to each other. But it’s so uncomplicated that we don’t even
think of it as state-of-the-art AI. Our smartphones and smart appliances give
us useful responses when we talk to them in a conversational style; they
understand what we’re saying despite our dialects and the tonality of our
voice - all because of NLP.

13. Spam Filters

Spam filters are one of the first applications of NLP in business. Words and
phrases are identified as spam, and in categories such as social, promotion, or
primary. If you are a Gmail user, you must have seen this categorization in
your inbox. So you’ve got NLP to thank for making your inbox manageable by
sorting your emails based on relevancy. In many companies, spam filters also
check for ip addresses, and automatically send tagged emails to the junk
folder.

14. Search Engines

Natural Language Processing has made search engines smart, and especially
helpful to e-commerce websites. With neural networks, the NLP technology
enables search engines to understand the query even before its completed.
And when you’re given results, the engine also gives you additional, similarly
relevant results, in case you want more options. To understand the scope of
efficiency and scope of the technology, we just have to look at the fact that
eBay alone has 185 million users, and they account for 250 million searches
daily.

What’s the difference between NLP and Text Analytics?

NLP technology understands, interprets, and classifies a company’s raw,

unstructured big data collected from different sources like customer reviews,
social media listening, employee forums, etc. Text analytics takes this now
organized data, and drives it through machine learning (ML) algorithms to
gain insights from it. This is how text analytics helps a company discover
business intelligence for prescriptive and predictive analytics within minutes.

But before an ML model can begin work on a set of data for your industry, and
you in particular, it has to be trained. And in order to be trained, it needs to
have an annotated corpus of data that is representative of the text that will be
eventually analyzed. Without NLP, there is precious little that can be done to
train the machine model.

NLP is often accomplished using neural networks to identify hidden patterns

and correlations in unstructured data. Once discovered, these patterns often
yield key semantic insights. For example, Named Entity Recognition
(NER) can be used to examine textual data and identify any person, place,
location, brand or business. In the context of business intelligence, this could
be used to track and monitor conversations about competitors.

We will look at neural networks and knowledge graphs a little more in detail
later. But first, let’s examine why ML and NLP are so closely connected.

Machine Learning (ML) and NLP

Machine Learning (ML) is a form of AI. It is a technique used to automatically

identify patterns in data that can be used to provide actionable insights that a
business can use. This data may be from social media websites, videos,
chatbots, customer surveys and reviews, electronic health records (EMRs),
Voice of Employee (VoE) programs, or numerous other sources. Natural
Language Processing transforms all of this human language, with all its
intricasies, into a format that a machine model can understand. It bridges the
gap between the machine and a human being.

Close to one exabyte of data is created daily on the internet through news,
websites, blogs, emails, reviews, videos, forums, e-commerce, chats, and a
hundred different other ways. We use the internet to access news or ask a
query almost everyday. We are curious to know more about a certain
politician, sportsperson, an event, or even a holiday spot. We go to TikTok and
search for a new recipe. We search for customer reviews on Amazon before
we hit the checkout button. We go to YouTube because we want to know how
a certain product works, or how to play a tune on an instrument. We search
for something but it’s in a different language, so we hit Google Translate.
(Actually - around 200 million people use Google Translate everyday, which
accounts for one billion translations on a daily basis)

This huge deluge of big data being created continually can be a boon for
companies because it’s all just waiting to be discovered and harnessed for
business intelligence. And companies are already doing it. In a corporate set-
up too, 80% of data is just unstructured. It is across documents, emails, office
intranets, chatbots, attachments, videos, audio, webinars, presentations, and a
myriad other formats. This is another major reason why the NLP market is
growing exponentially.

None of these ML-based applications we take for granted are possible without
NLP. It is unimaginable to think about categorizing and annotating all of this
data manually, with the same speed and accuracy that an AI-led computer
program would. NLP accomplishes the task not only fast, but also effectively
and efficiently. And as the ML algorithms improve through each task, and as
they access the data and use it, they begin learning the patterns by
themselves. The richer the data, the more effective the results. And human
intervention is no longer required.
Knowledge Graphs and Neural Networks

Now that we’ve taken a look at how NLP helps drive an AI/ML model for
business intelligence - let’s understand how NLP actually achieves this
magnificent feat.

2 magic words - Neural Networks and Knowledge Graphs

Neural Networks

Artificial Neural Networks or simply “Neural Networks” (NN) are types of

mathematical algorithms that are modelled loosely on how the human brain
works to store information. A neural network is used to pre-train an ML task
through word embedding, in order to teach the algorithm how to predict a
word based on its context. This is how text classification is done in Natural
Language Processing.

NNs are still under significant R&D by data scientists, and are still a long way
from the remarkable superiority of human brain function. However, they can
still provide accurate insights in many areas that require predictive analysis
and control, such as stock price movements, geo-spatial mapping, and signal
filtering.

With deep-learning technology, neural networks identify the words or phrases

as named entities, disambiguate them based on surrounding context, and then
categorise them. For example, a neural network will help you know when
someone is talking about Paris, the city, versus, Paris, the socialite, gathering
the context from a mention of the Mona Lisa or any other entity/feature
related to the city.

Knowledge Graph

A Knowledge Graph contains millions of facts and data points about every
notable person, place, business or product. All of it is used to provide even
more context to the already existing information. Armed with this enriched
metadata, the knowledge graph shows which entities are related to one
another, and makes content suggestions and comparisons faster and more
accurately.

Let’s take the above mentioned example of Paris. When a NN identifies the
context and focuses on Paris, the city in France, it connects all the information
it has clustered together and classified it as related to Paris. For example, it
will know that the Eiffel Tower is located in Paris. The Eiffel tower is a tourist
attraction, and so is the world-famous Louvre. So it connects the two as
related to each other. It will then form a connection to the Mona Lisa, since it’s
the most famous of the Louvre’s collections. It will then link the Mona Lisa to
the artist Leonardo da Vinci, and by that connection realise that it’s the most
important painting from the Italian Renaissance. Thus connecting Paris, the
city, to Italy, the country in Europe.

It is for this reason that NNs need to be updated regularly so that the data
remains current. Doing so ensures that the coverage of the knowledge graph
remains comprehensive and consistently high. And in turn, the results given
by the ML model are most relevant and accurate. This also enables semantic
search to provide you an even more expressive and powerful search
experience that can help you navigate deeper into your data.
Knowledge Graph that shows the relationship between different entities

Conclusion

NLP has radically changed how industries function. It can amplify your
business, and help you move in the right direction. It gives you better
operational efficiency, scalability, agility, and resource management. As more
and more companies move towards AI-powered machine models, it is time to
study the effectiveness of your own legacy models. By adopting cognitive
technologies like NLP, you can be at the forefront of technological
advancements that make you a market leader.