Browsed by
Category: AI News

Overcoming NLP Challenges: Tips and Best Practices

Overcoming NLP Challenges: Tips and Best Practices

Tips for Overcoming Natural Language Processing Challenges

natural language processing problems

Social media monitoring tools can use NLP techniques to extract mentions of a brand, product, or service from social media posts. Once detected, these mentions can be analyzed for sentiment, engagement, and other metrics. This information can then inform marketing strategies or evaluate their effectiveness. NLP is useful for personal assistants such as Alexa, enabling the virtual assistant to understand spoken word commands.

  • But once it learns the semantic relations and inferences of the question, it will be able to automatically perform the filtering and formulation necessary to provide an intelligible answer, rather than simply showing you data.
  • Natural language processing, or NLP, is a field of artificial intelligence that focuses on the interaction between computers and humans using natural language.
  • Reasoning with large contexts is closely related to NLU and requires scaling up our current systems dramatically, until they can read entire books and movie scripts.
  • Unsurprisingly, Attention Mechanisms also excel in this area, due to their ability to pay attention to the specific words or phrases that seem to directly correlate with the sentiment of a given piece of text, once properly trained.

Natural Language Understanding or Linguistics and Natural Language Generation which evolves the task to understand and generate the text. Linguistics is the science of language which includes Phonology that refers to sound, Morphology word formation, Syntax sentence structure, Semantics syntax and Pragmatics which refers to understanding. Noah Chomsky, one of the first linguists of twelfth century that started syntactic theories, marked a unique position in the field of theoretical linguistics because he revolutionized the area of syntax (Chomsky, 1965) [23].

Text summarization

The main challenge of NLP is the understanding and modeling of elements within a variable context4. Merity et al. [86] extended conventional word-level language models based on Quasi-Recurrent Neural Network and LSTM to handle the granularity at character and word level. They tuned the parameters for character-level modeling using Penn Treebank dataset and word-level modeling using WikiText-103.

natural language processing problems

Machine-learning models can be predominantly categorized as either generative or discriminative. Generative methods can generate synthetic data because of which they create rich models of probability distributions. Discriminative methods are more functional and have right estimating posterior probabilities and are based on observations. Srihari [129] explains the different generative models as one with a resemblance that is used to spot an unknown speaker’s language and would bid the deep knowledge of numerous languages to perform the match. Discriminative methods rely on a less knowledge-intensive approach and using distinction between languages. Whereas generative models can become troublesome when many features are used and discriminative models allow use of more features [38].

Understand your data

The process of finding all expressions that refer to the same entity in a text is called coreference resolution. It is an important step for a lot of higher-level NLP tasks that involve natural language understanding such as document summarization, question answering, and information extraction. Notoriously difficult for NLP practitioners in the past decades, this problem has seen a revival with the introduction of cutting-edge deep-learning and reinforcement-learning techniques. At present, it is argued that coreference resolution may be instrumental in improving the performances of NLP neural architectures like RNN and LSTM. The third step to overcome NLP challenges is to experiment with different models and algorithms for your project.

NLP has paved the way for digital assistants, chatbots, voice search, and a host of applications we’ve yet to imagine. Even though emotion analysis has improved overtime still the true interpretation of a text is open-ended. For such a low gain in accuracy, losing all explainability seems like a harsh trade-off. However, with more natural language processing problems complex models we can leverage black box explainers such as LIME in order to get some insight into how our classifier works. If we are getting a better result while preventing our model from “cheating” then we can truly consider this model an upgrade. We have labeled data and so we know which tweets belong to which categories.

These seem like the most relevant words out of all previous models and therefore we’re more comfortable deploying in to production. Although our metrics on our test set only increased slightly, we have much more confidence in the terms our model is using, and thus would feel more comfortable deploying it in a system that would interact with customers. Our classifier creates more false negatives than false positives (proportionally). In other words, our model’s most common error is inaccurately classifying disasters as irrelevant.

But what is different here is their application on images such that a model knows what region to focus on. But Visual QAS can even be extended to the problem of image captioning, where a model is required to generate a proper caption for the image in question. These architectures are built with temporal neural layers such as RNNs and LSTMs and are then trained on corpora, in either a supervised manner, or, sometimes, using Reinforcement Learning methodologies, until the loss is minimized.

Though natural language processing tasks are closely intertwined, they can be subdivided into categories for convenience. Neural machine translation, based on then-newly-invented sequence-to-sequence transformations, made obsolete the intermediate steps, such as word alignment, previously necessary for statistical machine translation. Since the number of labels in most classification problems is fixed, it is easy to determine the score for each class and, as a result, the loss from the ground truth. In image generation problems, the output resolution and ground truth are both fixed. As a result, we can calculate the loss at the pixel level using ground truth. But in NLP, though output format is predetermined in the case of NLP, dimensions cannot be specified.

natural language processing problems