What is Natural Language Understanding (NLU)?

The field of Natural Language Processing can often, roughly speaking, be divided into two main endeavours: Natural Language Generation (NLG) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU).

NLG relates to the generation of human language by computers (think chatbots, automated abstractive summaries, etc.). It remains a difficult but fascinating area of research at the intersection of Natural Language Processing, Data Science and Human-Computer Interaction.Natural Language UnderstandingNLU works with inputs of human language and interpreting its meaning. While encompassing such basic processing tasks such as parsing, lemmatization and parts-of-speech tagging, there are much more advanced tasks at play, such as the actual semantics of sentences and words.

Why is Natural Language Understanding important?

Customers may mention your products, services, or brand indirectly, in other conversations, both as a central topic or in passing, in shout-outs or comments in the news or social media. Customer Feedback may also be solicited directly by yourself in market research, in surveys, questionnaires, or other data collected by yourself. It is highly important to understand what is being said.

The task of NLU extends to extracting actionable business insights from unstructured textual data. These insights allow you to pinpoint what exactly is driving profitability in your business.

How does Gavagai handle NLU?

One of the core modules of our Natural Language Understanding is our Living Lexicon, which is based on word space technology or word embeddings. Our in-house word embeddings are unique. Our semantics is learned from vast online data streams and random indexing techniques in order to produce high-quality domain-independent word embeddings.

Our technology is equally good at understanding all types and genres of text, be it tweets, social media data, customer reviews, news articles or blogs. Our Natural Language Understanding allows us to make sense of large amounts of data, including making connections between words and misspellings, variations and transcription errors.

We use our Natural Language Understanding together with our expertise in Topic Modelling and Sentiment Analysis to make sense of data in an unprecedented way. By analysing unstructured textual data in a quantified, structured and ordered manner, the Gavagai Explorer allows anyone to gain real insight into what aspects are driving customer satisfaction and ultimately controlling business profitability.