NLP or Natural Language Processing has become more than just an emerging technology – it is here to stay!  Each new invention that comes out seems designed to better understand the way(s) that humans communicate – whether that be in formal writing, slang, phrases, inflections…the list goes on and on.  Programming a non-human system to understand the nuances of human communication seems a genuinely daunting task.  But around the world, NLP continues to find new applications -

Read about this company in Sweden where NLP is a way of life…

Gavagai

“Unlike traditional approaches to text analytics, we begin by modelling meaning instead of structure. Instead of relying on the standard processing pipeline, we rely on a live semantic memory model that continuously learns and understands text without any human intervention.”…”It learns the meanings of words by observing their usages and contexts, and it never stops learning: language evolves constantly, as do our semantic memories.”

They’ve taken analysis of Social Media to a new level, and had stunning success in evaluating that data to be predictive of outcomes.  Here’s how they fared with poll data in September 2015:

Gavagai and the most recent Greek election

And if you’ve never heard of “word embeddings” - vectors whose relative similarities correlate with semantic similarity – here’s an explanation that actually makes sense  (I minored in Lit in college, and this never came up.  I do write a great sonnet, though!)

A brief history of word embeddings (and some clarifications)

If you’re interested in Social Media and its effect and interplay with the next advances in computing, you’re in good company.  What is the future ‘saying’ to you?

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