How does natural language processing work?

NLP is an AI technology that has the ability to recognize and understand natural human languages. To do so, it performs

Segmentation 

Breaking the entire document down into its constituent sentences, e.g. full stops and commas.

Tokenization

Breaking down a sentence into its constituent words and storing these constituents, e.g. each word is called a “token”.

Stop words detection

Getting rid of non-essential words to sound more cohesive, e.g. “are”, “and”, “the”.

Stemming 

Explaining words to the machine by extracting the stem and the suffixes, prefixes, etc. -ing, -ed.

Lemmatization

Identifying different word base for word tenses, e.g. mood and gender.

Part-of-speech tagging

Explaining the concept of nouns, verbs, prepositions, adjectives, and other parts of speech to the machine by adding part-of-speech tags to words, e.g. went – verb.

Named entity tagging 

Introducing the machine to pop culture references and everyday names by flagging names of movies, important personalities, etc.

We tend to use NLP applications daily but have not probably paid enough attention to them. For example, there are various spell-checkers, online search, translators, and voice assistants. But how does NLP do that? How does it work? Let’s break down NLP tasks performed by NLP software.