Sunday, May 23, 2004

Explaining business concepts using NLP

Now, this was a surprise: usually we go through hoops and contortions to explain NLP concepts and use any possible analogy to make them clearer. Ephraim Schwartz at InfoWorld is doing just the opposite: he is using NLP concepts to explain supply chain by numbers:



From a common-sense point of view, the way statistical analysis works seems illogical. The more complex a data set becomes, for instance, the easier it is to make predictions.



For example, take NLU (natural language understanding) research. If I begin with only the word “the,” a computer program would have far less than a 1 percent chance of predicting the remainder of the sentence. However, if I add the word “day” to follow “the,” making the sentence more complex, the likelihood of guessing the third word might be 50 percent or better. The word “day” is singular and “the day” will require a verb.



Does this mean natural language processing is becoming more mainstream?

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