Book Image

Natural Language Understanding with Python

By : Deborah A. Dahl
5 (1)
Book Image

Natural Language Understanding with Python

5 (1)
By: Deborah A. Dahl

Overview of this book

Natural Language Understanding facilitates the organization and structuring of language allowing computer systems to effectively process textual information for various practical applications. Natural Language Understanding with Python will help you explore practical techniques for harnessing NLU to create diverse applications. with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts and practical examples, you’ll begin by learning about NLU and its applications. You’ll then explore a wide range of current NLU techniques and their most appropriate use-case. In the process, you’ll be introduced to the most useful Python NLU libraries. Not only will you learn the basics of NLU, you’ll also discover practical issues such as acquiring data, evaluating systems, and deploying NLU applications along with their solutions. The book is a comprehensive guide that’ll help you explore techniques and resources that can be used for different applications in the future. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with the concepts of natural language understanding, deep learning, and large language models (LLMs) for building various AI-based applications.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started with Natural Language Understanding Technology
4
Part 2:Developing and Testing Natural Language Understanding Systems
16
Part 3: Systems in Action – Applying Natural Language Understanding at Scale

Future directions in NLU technology and research

While the recent improvements in NLU technology based on transformers and LLMs, which we reviewed in Chapter 11, have resulted in very impressive capabilities, it is important to point out that there are many topics in NLU that are far from solved. In this section, we will look at some of the most active research areas – extending NLU to new languages, speech-to-speech translation, multimodal interaction, and avoiding bias.

Quickly extending NLU technologies to new languages

A precise count of the number of currently spoken languages is difficult to obtain. However, according to WorldData.info, there are currently about 6,500 languages spoken throughout the world (https://www.worlddata.info/languages/index.php#:~:text=There%20are%20currently%20around%206%2C500,of%20Asia%2C%20Australia%20and%20Oceania). Some languages, such as Mandarin, English, Spanish, and Hindi, are spoken by many millions of people, while other languages...