Natural Language

Processing and its

Applications

Group 3 - Ankita Singh | Ashish Pathak | Mohit Agrawal | Pramendra | Ravi Charan | Thiribhuvan
Introduction
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the sub-field of Computer Science especially
Artificial Intelligence (AI) that is concerned about enabling computers to understand
and process human language. Technically, the main task of NLP would be to program
computers for analysing and processing huge amount of natural language data.

Phases of NLP
 Application 1

Customer service
“How can I keep my customers happy?”
Routing tickets or support communication
Issue -
 Interactive voice response (IVR) systems that ask callers specific questions and route them through pre-programmed
paths. But what if the options presented don’t address a caller’s issue? Many people end up frustrated with these
systems, and customer service suffers.
 In a system without NLP, when a support ticket is raised by customer, it first passes through a general support desk
where a person will manually forward it to concern department. This results to very long response time and wait
queues affecting customer satisfaction.

Solution –
 Natural language understanding, closely related to NLP, makes it easier for callers to tell the system what they need in
their own words, rather than requiring them to use certain phrases and speak in a stiff manner.
 NLP also makes it possible for the system to ask open-ended questions, understand context in replies, and respond to
caller requests to repeat something or pause.
 Using NLP, the context/relevant department of the support ticket can be identified and the ticket can be automatically
routed suitably saving time and money.

American Airlines saw significant results from this NLP use case for their customer service team. After revamping their
IVR system, they increased their call containment by as much as 5%—saving the airline millions of dollars.
Understanding Customer Complaint & Feedback
 Customer feedback is valuable data for businesses. It can help you fix flaws with product and identify which aspects people
are loving. Both of which are excellent foundations for your marketing and advertising campaigns.

 NLP helps identify words or phrases commonly used. For example, words like “modern,” “intuitive,” and “expensive,” which
could indicate your customers see you as a luxury, high-end brand

 NLP can also find topics spoken about in feedback forms. This might be words like “easy onboarding” or “affordable plans.”

 Finding patterns of sentiment (positive or negative) in huge volumes of customer interactions, and using these insights to
determine areas of excellent or improvement within a business

 Analysing consumer complaints to mine common trends to work upon

 For example, whether complaints are coming directly via email or through the “why did you leave us?” box on your
cancellation form, NLP can pick out the trends within this data, and notify your team before they become a problem

With the emergence of AI, unstructured data is expected to account for 93% of all data in the digital universe by 2022.
NLP algorithms will be the key that unlocks the true potential of unstructured data and can help businesses develop a
long-term competitive advantage for themselves.
 Chat Bots and Automated Online Assistants
 Chatbots build using NLP can interpret human inputs and
respond accordingly, providing a conversational experience.

 Chatbots can replace live chat functions on websites and are

available all the time, not just during business hours

 A chatbot can answer many questions and provide an

instantaneous response to customer complaints so that even if
it takes a human agent to address the issue, the customer feels
they’re being heard.

 As NLP improves, chatbots will be able to handle increasingly

complex consumer communications, shifting weight off
customer service agents so that they can focus more on
emotional complaints rather than regular ones.

 What’s more, advances in NLP will make personalization

possible. Chatbots will be able to remember past conversations
with users to customize questions, responses, and options

It’s no wonder that by 2020, 80% of businesses are expected to have some form of chatbot integration available to
their customers. In fact, Gartner predicts, chatbots will account for 85% of customer interactions by 2020
Relevant NLP Concepts Used
 Speech Recognition - ability of a machine or program to identify words and phrases in spoken language and convert
them to a machine-readable format
 Question Answering Model - is a computer science discipline within the fields of information retrieval and natural
language processing (NLP), which is concerned with building systems that automatically answer questions posed by
humans in a natural language.
 Usually a computer program, may construct its answers by querying a structured database of knowledge or
information, usually a knowledge base. More commonly, question answering systems can pull answers from an
unstructured collection of natural language documents (like internal organization documents and web pages, compiled
newswire reports, a set of Wikipedia pages etc.)
 Topic Modelling - it is a process to automatically identify topics present in a text object and to derive hidden patterns
exhibited by a text corpus
 Topic Modelling is different from rule-based text mining approaches that use regular expressions or dictionary based
keyword searching techniques. It is an unsupervised approach used for finding and observing the bunch of words
(called “topics”) in large clusters of texts.
 Application 2

Reputation monitoring
“What are people saying about me?”
Brand Perception
Issue -
In the 1980s, companies started using software to find patterns in their own data and make better decisions. While some
of this data is structured and ready to be analyzed (e.g. census data, stock prices), most of its value remains tapped in
unstructured, human-generated text such as news; blog posts; forums; patents; job postings; reports; SEC filings; social
media; company websites; etc.
These sources contain a plethora of precious information about how competitors, customers and the market as a whole are
evolving. And as consumers have started voicing their complaints on Twitter and Facebook, reputation monitoring and
management has become a top priority for businesses.

Solution –
Natural language understanding, closely related to NLP, makes it easier to analyse the sentiments of text i.e. which
determines the attitude, emotional state, judgment or intent of the writer.

Positive sentiment for Nike actually increased after the controversial ad campaign involving controversial National
Football League quarterback Colin Kaepernick was released. In fact, Nike’s overall sales jumped more than 31%.
Impact Assessment of Campaigns
Case - The two-minute spot highlights superstar athletes LeBron James, Serena Williams and others, and touches on the
controversy of NFL players protesting racial inequality, police brutality and other issues by kneeling during the national
anthem.
Result - The immediate response from the public when Nike announced
Kaepernick was going to be part of their new marketing campaign was
overwhelmingly negative: Customers even started their own hashtag
#justburnit in response to the campaign.

Positive sentiment for Nike

actually increased after the
controversial ad was released.
In fact, Nike’s overall sales
jumped more than 31%
Social Media Monitoring
Social Media Monitoring
Social Media Monitoring
Social Media Monitoring
Social Media Monitoring
Relevant NLP Concepts Used
Mentioned application task involves two algorithm related to NLP i.e. Sentiment Analysis and Coreference Resolution
1. Sentiment analysis, which determines the attitude, emotional state, judgment or intent of the writer. This is done by
either assigning a polarity to the text (positive, neutral or negative) or trying to recognize the underlying mood (happy,
sad, calm, angry…). What about the times when multiple attitudes need to be accounted for in the same sentence? For
example, “The pizza was amazing, but the waiter was awful!”
In the case above, the text is split into clauses, and polarity and mood are assessed for each. So, the previous text
becomes something like:
{“clause”: “The pizza was amazing”,
“polarity”: 0.92,
“mood”: “happy”},
{“clause”: “but the waiter was awful!”,
“polarity”: -0.95,
“mood”: “angry”}
2. Coreference resolution, which connects pronouns to the right objects. This is a hard task, but it’s essential to interpret
the text correctly. For example, if a customer writes: “A guy from the dealer called to ask if I liked my new car. Well, no
man, it sucks?”, it’s important to recognize that “it” refers to the car and not the guy. The customer is complaining about
the product, not the service. As Elon Musk says, “Brand is just a perception”. Right now, your customers are talking about
you, influencing the way other consumers perceive your brand. NLP can help you stay on top of your in-the-trenches
reputation.
 Application 3

Ad placement
Who is interested in my product?”
 Ad Placement
Issue -
Media buying is the largest line in a company’s advertising budget. Targeted advertising can save the money while
improving the conversion.
The focus was on demographics (age, gender, economic status etc.) and psychographics (values, personality, attitude,
opinions etc.)
Solutions -
The focus now shifted to digital footprint of the customers.
Digital footprint of the customers include – emails, social media, e-commerce and browsing behaviours. All this is
unstructured data.

Application –
2 of the top 10 companies today make their money by selling ads (Google and Facebook). NLP is helping them in
generating money.
NLP in ad placement
Key Word Matching –
It checks whether the words of interest are included in some text. Although, it is a
basic task in NLP, it is much more efficient than traditional advertising.

Sense disambiguation –
It identifies which sense of a word is used in a sentence. Works like a human brain.
Ex- “I gained 20 pounds since March”
Pounds can be weight or currency. However, an NLP program with sense
disambiguation can identify it as weight.
 Application 4

Market intelligence
“What’s happening with my competitors?”
 Issue –Markets are influenced by information exchange – between company/shareholders, government/citizens or simply individuals.
Knowing the status of an industry is essential to developing an effective strategy, but the channels of content distribution today (RSS feeds,
social media, emails) produce so much information that it’s becoming hard to keep up.

• Data is clunky, messy, and full of garbage

• There are many platforms from where data can be gathered

• The “now what” factor: What are you supposed to do with social media insights?

Solution –

NLP makes makes monitoring and analysing social media activity surrounding a brand easy.

NLP helps businesses make sense of information quickly and at scale through text extraction and categorization. It helps in monitoring your
competitors’ activity across multiple platforms, identifies their strengths and weaknesses, reveals product and service gaps.

Leading airlines leverage competitive insights to keep their finger on the pulse. Airfare Insights helps air carriers keep
tabs on relevant fare changes in the marketplace and adjust their pricing strategies for greater profit margins.
The classic example for use of NLP in
Marketing Intelligence can be
Microsoft Dynamic Marketing Insights.
It revels countless insights from market
just by typing 3 words. It personalizes
AI driven insights to the customer
specific needs.
Moreover it uses social insights to
listen to what customers and
competitors are saying and track how
their sentiments change over time-
this includes using AI to detect intent
for new sales leads or service
questions
 Relevant NLP Concepts Used

Event extraction, which recognizes what’s happening to an entity. M&As, employment changes, deal closings and
everything else that happens to organizations or people can be extracted automatically. For example, “Howard
Schultz Stepping Down As Starbucks CEO” can be parsed as:
{“company”: “Starbucks”,
“position”: “CEO”,
“person”: “Howard Schultz”,
“event”: “end of employment”}

Sentence classification, or putting a sentence in a predefined set of buckets. This is often used as a first pass to
extract relevant content from large repositories, like the SEC’s EDGAR system. For example, “We expect a 15%
increase in revenue next year,” can be classified as a forward-looking statement.
 Application 5

Regulatory compliance
“Is my product a liability?”
Regulatory Review and Compliance
Issue -
With both increased globalization and the enhanced understanding
of risk  growing requirement for regulation.
Changes in regulation, both over the past few years and looking to
the future, mean companies need tools and solutions to assist with
regulatory review and compliance.
Core Problem: In some cases, meeting the regulators’ requirements
is straightforward, whilst in other cases, accessing the necessary
data can take a significant amount of time, money and effort, all of
which increases costs but does not necessarily increase revenue.

Solution –
NLP text analytics solution that can be deployed to find, highlight, and extract key data within regulatory documents,
check for contract grammar codings, mark up inconsistencies across documents, and more.
Pharma: A delayed application can also be costly
How much are we talking about?
The top 20 drugs in the United States accounted for $319.9 billion in sales in 2011; so a newly launched blockbuster
could make around $2Bn in the first year launched – that’s $6M per day.
If errors in the quality review hold up an NDA for even just a week this could generate significant costs.
So – how can text analytics improve this quality assurance process?
NLP can be used to develop an automated process to improve quality control of regulatory document submission.
The process cross-checks codings, references to tables, decimal place errors, and discrepancies between the summary
document and source documents. This requires the use of advanced processing to extract information from tables in PDF
documents as well as natural language processing to analyze the free text.
Banking: Compliance too complex
The significant volume and persisting complexity of regulation and compliance
reporting requirements makes it exponentially difficult for bank and financial services
compliance professionals to keep track and map these requirements to their entire
enterprise operations.
Particularly for global businesses that extend across multiple regulatory regimes, it
becomes inordinately difficult to manually craft a single compliance framework that
will be able to address all the nuances and requirements.
NLP and machine learning can be instrumental in comparing and contrasting
external compliance requirements to internal enterprise policy and process.
NLP quantitative analytics can score policy documents to determine semantic
similarity to regulatory and compliance pronouncements, as well as compare exam
responses to ever-changing regulator information requests.