Guide to Natural Language Understanding NLU in 2023

NLP vs NLU: from Understanding a Language to Its Processing by Sciforce Sciforce

As such, it deals with lower-level tasks such as tokenization and POS tagging. Natural Language Understanding provides machines with the capabilities to understand and interpret human language in a way that goes beyond surface-level processing. It is designed to extract meaning, intent, and context from text or speech, allowing machines to comprehend contextual and emotional touch and intelligently respond to human communication.

This is done by identifying the main topic of a document and then using NLP to determine the most appropriate way to write the document in the user’s native language. NLU makes it possible to carry out a dialogue with a computer using a human-based language. This is useful for consumer products or device features, such as voice assistants and speech to text. The subtleties of humor, sarcasm, and idiomatic expressions can still be difficult for NLU and NLP to accurately interpret and translate. To overcome these hurdles, brands often supplement AI-driven translations with human oversight. Linguistic experts review and refine machine-generated translations to ensure they align with cultural norms and linguistic nuances.

One of the key advantages of using NLU and NLP in virtual assistants is their ability to provide round-the-clock support across various channels, including websites, social media, and messaging apps. This ensures that customers can receive immediate assistance at any time, significantly enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty. Additionally, these AI-driven tools can handle a vast number of queries simultaneously, reducing wait times and freeing up human agents to focus on more complex or sensitive issues. The promise of NLU and NLP extends beyond mere automation; it opens the door to unprecedented levels of personalization and customer engagement.

Customer Retention: Strategies, Key Metrics & Examples

For those interested, here is our benchmarking on the top sentiment analysis tools in the market. This book is for managers, programmers, directors – and anyone else who wants to learn machine learning. To pass the test, a human evaluator will interact with a machine and another human at the same time, each in a different room. If the evaluator is not able to reliably tell the difference between the response generated by the machine and the other human, then the machine passes the test and is considered to be exhibiting “intelligent” behavior. NLP can process text from grammar, structure, typo, and point of view—but it will be NLU that will help the machine infer the intent behind the language text.

The rise of chatbots can be attributed to advancements in AI, particularly in the fields of natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU), and natural language generation (NLG). These technologies allow chatbots to understand and respond to human language in an accurate and natural way. The application of NLU and NLP in analyzing customer feedback, social media conversations, and other forms of unstructured data has become a game-changer for businesses aiming to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive market.

He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem’s work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School. The procedure of determining mortgage rates is comparable to that of determining insurance risk.

The Practical Guide to NLP and NLU

By way of contrast, NLU targets deep semantic understanding and multi-faceted analysis to comprehend the meaning, aim, and textual environment. NLU techniques enable systems to grasp the nuances, references, and connections within the text or speech resolve ambiguities and incorporate external knowledge for a comprehensive understanding. With an eye on surface-level processing, NLP prioritizes tasks like sentence structure, word order, and basic syntactic analysis, but it does not delve into comprehension of deeper semantic layers of the text or speech.

For intent-based models, there are 3 major steps involved — normalizing, tokenizing, and intent classification. Then there’s an optional step of recognizing entities, and for LLM-powered bots the final stage is generation. These steps are how the chatbot to reads and understands each customer message, before formulating a response. NLP-powered virtual agents are bots that rely on intent systems and pre-built dialogue flows — with different pathways depending on the details a user provides — to resolve customer issues.

As a result, NLU  deals with more advanced tasks like semantic analysis, coreference resolution, and intent recognition. Natural language generation is another subset of natural language processing. While natural language understanding focuses on computer reading comprehension, natural language generation enables computers to write.

• NLP takes input text in the form of natural language, converts it into a computer language, processes it, and returns the information as a response in a natural language.
• Cem’s work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider.
• Here are some of the best NLP papers from the Association for Computational Linguistics 2022 conference.
• 2 min read – With rapid technological changes such as cloud computing and AI, learn how to thrive in the foundation model era.
• There are several challenges in accomplishing this, like a word with several meanings, i.e., polysemy, or different words with similar meanings, i.e., synonymy and so on.

This intelligent robotic assistant can also learn from past customer conversations and use this information to improve future responses. NLU, a subset of NLP, delves deeper into the comprehension aspect, focusing specifically on the machine’s ability to understand the intent and meaning behind the text. While nlp and nlu NLP breaks down the language into manageable pieces for analysis, NLU interprets the nuances, ambiguities, and contextual cues of the language to grasp the full meaning of the text. It’s the difference between recognizing the words in a sentence and understanding the sentence’s sentiment, purpose, or request.

After all, different sentences can mean the same thing, and, vice versa, the same words can mean different things depending on how they are used. The machine should understand what is spoken or typed by the end of the process. There are several challenges in accomplishing this, like a word with several meanings, i.e., polysemy, or different words with similar meanings, i.e., synonymy and so on.

NLU is the component that allows the contextual assistant to understand the intent of each utterance by a user. Without it, the assistant won’t be able to understand what a user means throughout a conversation. And if the assistant doesn’t understand what the user means, it won’t respond appropriately or at all in some cases. This technology is used in chatbots that help customers with their queries, virtual assistants that help with scheduling, and smart home devices that respond to voice commands. Some common applications of NLP include sentiment analysis, machine translation, speech recognition, chatbots, and text summarization. NLP is used in industries such as healthcare, finance, e-commerce, and social media, among others.

A chatbot may use NLP to understand the structure of a customer’s sentence and identify the main topic or keyword. For example, if a customer says, “I want to order a pizza with extra cheese and pepperoni,” the AI chatbot uses NLP to understand that the customer wants to order a pizza and that the pizza should have extra cheese and pepperoni. As the name suggests, the initial goal of NLP is language processing and manipulation. It focuses on the interactions between computers and individuals, with the goal of enabling machines to understand, interpret, and generate natural language. Its main aim is to develop algorithms and techniques that empower machines to process and manipulate textual or spoken language in a useful way.

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As a result, algorithms search for associations and correlations to infer what the sentence’s most likely meaning is rather than understanding the genuine meaning of human languages. With the rise of generative AI chatbots, we’ve now entered a new era of natural language processing. But unlike intent-based AI models, instead of sending a pre-defined answer based on the intent that was triggered, generative models can create original output. Similarly, NLU is expected to benefit from advances in deep learning and neural networks. We can expect to see virtual assistants and chatbots that can better understand natural language and provide more accurate and personalized responses. Additionally, NLU is expected to become more context-aware, meaning that virtual assistants and chatbots will better understand the context of a user’s query and provide more relevant responses.

So, even though there are many overlaps between NLP and NLU, this differentiation sets them distinctly apart. NLP focuses on processing the text in a literal sense, like what was said. Conversely, NLU focuses on extracting the context and intent, or in other words, what was meant. Request a demo and our team will help you build a chatbot that is not only powered by our cutting-edge NLP engine but also understands 100+ languages and can be deployed to more than 35 channels with a single click. Read more about the difference between rules-based chatbots and AI chatbots.

NLP and NLU have made these possible and continue shaping the virtual communication field. Two subsets of artificial intelligence (AI), these technologies enable smart systems to grasp, process, and analyze spoken and written human language to further provide a response and maintain a dialogue. As can be seen by its tasks, NLU is the integral part of natural language processing, the part that is responsible for human-like understanding of the meaning rendered by a certain text.

NLP focuses on processing and analyzing data to extract meaning and insights. NLU is concerned with understanding the meaning and intent behind data, while NLG is focused on generating natural-sounding responses. These technologies work together to create intelligent chatbots that can handle various customer service tasks. As we see advancements in AI technology, we can expect chatbots to have more efficient and human-like interactions with customers. NLU helps computers to understand human language by understanding, analyzing and interpreting basic speech parts, separately. NLU, a subset of natural language processing (NLP) and conversational AI, helps conversational AI applications to determine the purpose of the user and direct them to the relevant solutions.

NLP vs. NLU: from Understanding a Language to Its Processing

This significantly broadens the potential customer base, making products and services accessible to a wider audience. Additionally, NLU and NLP are pivotal in the creation of conversational interfaces that offer intuitive and seamless interactions, whether through chatbots, virtual assistants, or other digital touchpoints. This enhances the customer experience, making every interaction more engaging and efficient. Intent recognition and sentiment analysis are the main outcomes of the NLU. Thus, it helps businesses to understand customer needs and offer them personalized products. NLU formulates meaningful responses based on the learning curve for the machine.

Then, a dialogue policy determines what next step the dialogue system makes based on the current state. Finally, the NLG gives a response based on the semantic frame.Now that we’ve seen how a typical dialogue system works, let’s clearly understand NLP, NLU, and NLG in detail. To learn why computers have struggled to understand language, it’s helpful to first figure out why they’re so competent at playing chess. There are more possible moves in a game than there are atoms in the universe. For example, in NLU, various ML algorithms are used to identify the sentiment, perform Name Entity Recognition (NER), process semantics, etc. NLU algorithms often operate on text that has already been standardized by text pre-processing steps.

Current systems are prone to bias and incoherence, and occasionally behave erratically. Despite the challenges, machine learning engineers have many opportunities to apply NLP in ways that are ever more central to a functioning society. In Figure 2, we see a more sophisticated manifestation of NLP, which gives language the structure needed to process different phrasings of what is functionally the same request. With a greater level of intelligence, NLP helps computers pick apart individual components of language and use them as variables to extract only relevant features from user utterances.

With more progress in technology made in recent years, there has also emerged a new branch of artificial intelligence, other than NLP and NLU. It is another subfield of NLP called NLG, or Natural Language Generation, which has received a lot of prominence and recognition in recent times. Whereas in NLP, it totally depends on how the machine is able to process the targeted spoken or written data and then take proper decisions and actions on how to deal with them. “We use NLU to analyze customer feedback so we can proactively address concerns and improve CX,” said Hannan. At Kommunicate, we envision a world-beating customer support solution to empower the new era of customer support. We would love to have you on board to have a first-hand experience of Kommunicate.

From the computer’s point of view, any natural language is a free form text. That means there are no set keywords at set positions when providing an input. LLMs aren’t coming; they are here, and they will change businesses everywhere. Those businesses that see the value of NLP and LLMs together will be the big winners in this changing world. They will be able to maximize the investments being made in LLMs and will be faster to market with interactive LLM applications that let users investigate their information at a deeper level.

But, in the end, NLP and NLU are needed to break down complexity and extract valuable information. In this section, we will introduce the top 10 use cases, of which five are related to pure NLP capabilities and the remaining five need for NLU to assist computers in efficiently automating these use cases. Figure 4 depicts our sample of 5 use cases in which businesses should favor NLP over NLU or vice versa. Let’s illustrate this example by using a famous NLP model called Google Translate.

How are NLP, NLU, and NLG Applied?

These technologies empower marketers to tailor content, offers, and experiences to individual preferences and behaviors, cutting through the typical noise of online marketing. Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) are pioneering the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in transforming business-audience communication. These advanced AI technologies are reshaping the rules of engagement, enabling marketers to create messages with unprecedented personalization and relevance. This article will examine the intricacies of NLU and NLP, exploring their role in redefining marketing and enhancing the customer experience. As a seasoned technologist, Adarsh brings over 14+ years of experience in software development, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to his role. His expertise in building scalable and robust tech solutions has been instrumental in the company’s growth and success.

Bharat Saxena has over 15 years of experience in software product development, and has worked in various stages, from coding to managing a product. With BMC, he supports the AMI Ops Monitoring for Db2 product development team. His current active areas of research are conversational AI and algorithmic bias in AI.

Enterprises are constantly looking for innovative ways to enhance user experience, boost sales and achieve business growth in a highly competitive and ever-evolving marketplace. NLU Chatbots are key AI-based technological tools that help organizations provide simulated natural language interactions with users, thereby enhancing client satisfaction levels. If you’re also looking to deploy intelligent chatbots that deliver delightful client experiences, then you are at the right place.

Syntax determines the arrangement of words in a sentence to make grammatical sense. The software uses syntax to find out the meaning of a language based on grammatical rules like parsing, word segmentation, sentence breaking, morphological segmentation and stemming. In recent years, with so many advancements in research and technology, companies and industries worldwide have opted for the support of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to speed up and grow their business. AI uses the intelligence and capabilities of humans in software and programming to boost efficiency and productivity in business. In this case, the person’s objective is to purchase tickets, and the ferry is the most likely form of travel as the campground is on an island.

• And with the astronomical rise of generative AI — heralding a new era in the development of NLP — bots have become even more human-like.
• But this is a problem for machines—any algorithm will need the input to be in a set format, and these three sentences vary in their structure and format.
• For example, using NLG, a computer can automatically generate a news article based on a set of data gathered about a specific event or produce a sales letter about a particular product based on a series of product attributes.
• As a result, they do not require both excellent NLU skills and intent recognition.
• NLP uses computational linguistics, computational neuroscience, and deep learning technologies to perform these functions.
• NLU and NLP have greatly impacted the way businesses interpret and use human language, enabling a deeper connection between consumers and businesses.

As seen in Figure 3, Google translates the Turkish proverb “Damlaya damlaya göl olur.” as “Drop by drop, it becomes a lake.” This is an exact word by word translation of the sentence. In the world of AI, for a machine to be considered intelligent, it must pass the Turing Test. A test developed by Alan Turing in the 1950s, which pits humans against the machine. A task called word sense disambiguation, which sits under the NLU umbrella, makes sure that the machine is able to understand the two different senses that the word “bank” is used.

There are various ways that people can express themselves, and sometimes this can vary from person to person. Especially for personal assistants to be successful, an important point is the correct understanding of the user. NLU transforms the complex structure of the language into a machine-readable structure. This enables text analysis and enables machines to respond to human queries. In addition, NLU and NLP significantly enhance customer service by enabling more efficient and personalized responses.

NLU and NLP technologies address these challenges by going beyond mere word-for-word translation. They analyze the context and cultural nuances of language to provide translations that are both linguistically accurate and culturally appropriate. By understanding the intent behind words and phrases, these technologies can adapt content to reflect local idioms, customs, and preferences, thus avoiding potential misunderstandings or cultural insensitivities. NLU and NLP have become pivotal in the creation of personalized marketing messages and content recommendations, driving engagement and conversion by delivering highly relevant and timely content to consumers. These technologies analyze consumer data, including browsing history, purchase behavior, and social media activity, to understand individual preferences and interests. By interpreting the nuances of the language that is used in searches, social interactions, and feedback, NLU and NLP enable marketers to tailor their communications, ensuring that each message resonates personally with its recipient.

A significant shift occurred in the late 1980s with the advent of machine learning (ML) algorithms for language processing, moving away from rule-based systems to statistical models. This shift was driven by increased computational power and a move towards corpus linguistics, which relies on analyzing large datasets of language to learn patterns and make predictions. This era saw the development of systems that could take advantage of existing multilingual corpora, significantly advancing the field of machine translation. NLU and NLP have greatly impacted the way businesses interpret and use human language, enabling a deeper connection between consumers and businesses. By parsing and understanding the nuances of human language, NLU and NLP enable the automation of complex interactions and the extraction of valuable insights from vast amounts of unstructured text data.

But that doesn’t mean bot building itself is complicated — especially if you choose a provider with a no-code platform, an easy-to-use dialogue builder, and an application layer that provides seamless UX (like Ultimate). And now that you understand the inner workings of NLP and AI chatbots, you’re ready to build and deploy an AI-powered bot for your customer support. While each technology has its own unique set of applications and use cases, the lines between them are becoming increasingly blurred as they continue to evolve and converge. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. With the advancements in machine learning, deep learning, and neural networks, we can expect to see even more powerful and accurate NLP, NLU, and NLG applications in the future. However, when it comes to handling the requests of human customers, it becomes challenging.