What is Natural Language Processing?

(NLP)
Natural Language is a powerful tool of Artificial Intelligence that enables computers to
understand, interpret and generate human readable text that is meaningful. NLP is a method
used for processing and analyzing the text data. In Natural Language Processing the text is
tokenized means the text is break into tokens, it could be words, phrases or character. It is
the first step in NLP task. The text is cleaned and preprocessed before applying Natural
Language Processing technique.
Natural Language Processing technique is used in machine translation, healthcare, finance,
customer service, sentiment analysis and extracting valuable information from the text
data. NLP is also used in text generation and language modeling. Natural Processing
technique can also be used in answering the questions. Many companies uses Natural
Language Processing technique to solve their text related problems. Tools such
as ChatGPT, Google Bard that trained on large corpus of test of data uses Natural Language
Processing technique to solve the user queries.

10 Major Challenges of Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Natural Language Processing (NLP) faces various challenges due to the complexity and
diversity of human language.
1. Language differences
The human language and understanding is rich and intricated and there many languages
spoken by humans. Human language is diverse and thousands of human languages spoken
around the world with having its own grammar, vocabulary and cultural nuances. Human
cannot understand all the languages and the productivity of human language is high. There
is ambiguity in natural language since same words and phrases can have different meanings
and different context. This is the major challenges in understating of natural language.
There is a complex syntactic structures and grammatical rules of natural languages. The
rules are such as word order, verb, conjugation, tense, aspect and agreement. There is rich
semantic content in human language that allows speaker to convey a wide range of meaning
through words and sentences. Natural Language is pragmatics which means that how
language can be used in context to approach communication goals. The human language
evolves time to time with the processes such as lexical change.
2. Training Data
Training data is a curated collection of input-output pairs, where the input represents the
features or attributes of the data, and the output is the corresponding label or
target. Training data is composed of both the features (inputs) and their corresponding
labels (outputs). For NLP, features might include text data, and labels could be categories,
sentiments, or any other relevant annotations.
It helps the model generalize patterns from the training set to make predictions or
classifications on new, previously unseen data.
3. Development Time and Resource Requirements
Development Time and Resource Requirements for Natural Language Processing
(NLP) projects depends on various factors consisting the task complexity, size and quality
of the data, availability of existing tools and libraries, and the team of expert involved.
Here are some key points:
 Complexity of the task: Task such as classification of text or analyzing the sentiment
of the text may require less time compared to more complex tasks such as machine
translation or answering the questions.
 Availability and Quality Data: For Natural Language Processing models requires
high-quality of annotated data. It can be time consuming to collect, annotate, and pre-
process the large text datasets and can be resource-intensive especially for tasks that
requires specialized domain knowledge or fine-tuned annotations.
 Selection of algorithm and development of model: It is difficult to choose the right
algorithms machine learning algorithms that is best for Natural Language Processing
task.
 Evaluation and Training: It requires powerful computation resources that consists of
powerful hardware (GPUs or TPUs) and time for training the algorithms iteration. It is
also important to evaluate the performance of the model with the help of suitable
metrics and validation techniques for conforming the quality of the results.
4. Navigate Phrasing Ambiguities in NLP
It is a crucial aspect to navigate phrasing ambiguities because of the inherent complexity
of human languages. The cause of phrasing ambiguities is when a phrase can be evaluated
in multiple ways that leads to uncertainty in understanding the meaning. Here are some key
points for navigating phrasing ambiguities in NLP:
 Contextual Understanding: Contextual information like previous sentences, topic
focus, or conversational cues can give valuable clues for solving ambiguities.
 Semantic Analysis: The content of the semantic text is analyzed to find meaning
based on word, lexical relationships and semantic roles. Tools such as word sense
disambiguation, semantics role labelling can be helpful in solving phrasing
ambiguities.
 Syntactic Analysis: The syntactic structure of the sentence is analyzed to find the
possible evaluation based on grammatical relationships and syntactic patterns.
 Pragmatic Analysis: Pragmatic factors such as intentions of speaker, implicatures to
infer meaning of a phrase. This analysis consists of understanding the pragmatic
context.
 Statistical methods: Statistical methods and machine learning models are used to
learn patterns from data and make predictions about the input phrase.
5. Misspellings and Grammatical Errors
Overcoming Misspelling and Grammatical Error are the basic challenges in NLP, as there
are different forms of linguistics noise that can impact accuracy of understanding and
analysis. Here are some key points for solving misspelling and grammatical error in NLP:
 Spell Checking: Implement spell-check algorithms and dictionaries to find and
correct misspelled words.
 Text Normalization: The is normalized by converting into a standard format which
may contains tasks such as conversion of text to lowercase, removal of punctuation
and special characters, and expanding contractions.
 Tokenization: The text is split into individual tokens with the help of tokenization
techniques. This technique allows to identify and isolate misspelled words and
grammatical error that makes it easy to correct the phrase.
 Language Models: With the help of language models that is trained on large corpus
of data to predict the likelihood of word or phrase that is correct or not based on its
context.
6. Mitigating Innate Biases in NLP Algorithms
It is a crucial step of mitigating innate biases in NLP algorithm for conforming fairness,
equity, and inclusivity in natural language processing applications. Here are some key
points for mitigating biases in NLP algorithms.
 Collection of data and annotation: It is very important to confirm that the training
data used to develop NLP algorithms is diverse, representative and free from biases.
 Analysis and Detection of bias: Apply bias detection and analysis method on
training data to find biases that is based on demographic factors such as race, gender,
age.
 Data Pre-processing: Data Pre-processing the most important process to train data to
mitigate biases like debiasing word embeddings, balance class distributions and
augmenting underrepresented samples.
 Fair representation learning: Natural Language Processing models are trained to
learn fair representations that are invariant to protect attributes like race or gender.
 Auditing and Evaluation of Models: Natural Language models are evaluated for
fairness and bias with the help of metrics and audits. NLP models are evaluated on
diverse datasets and perform post-hoc analyses to find and mitigate innate biases in
NLP algorithms.
7. Words with Multiple Meanings
Words with multiple meaning plays a lexical challenge in Nature Language
Processing because of the ambiguity of the word. These words with multiple meaning are
known as polysemous or homonymous have different meaning based on the context in
which they are used. Here are some key points for representing the lexical challenge plays
by words with multiple meanings in NLP:
 Semantic analysis: Implement semantic analysis techniques to find the underlying
meaning of the word in various contexts. Word embedding or semantic networks are
the semantic representation can find the semantic similarity and relatedness between
different word sense.
 Domain specific knowledge: It is very important to have a specific domain-
knowledge in Natural Processing tasks that can be helpful in providing valuable
context and constraints for determining the correct context of the word.
 Multi-word Expression (MWEs): The meaning of the entire sentence or phrase is
analyzed to disambiguate the word with multiple meanings.
 Knowledge Graphs and Ontologies: Apply knowledge graphs and ontologies to find
the semantic relationships between different words context.
8. Addressing Multilingualism
It is very important to address language diversity and multilingualism in Natural Language
Processing to confirm that NLP systems can handle the text data in multiple languages
effectively. Here are some key points to address language diversity and multilingualism:
 Multilingual Corpora: Multilingual corpus consists of text data in various languages
and serve as valuable resources for training NLP models and systems.
 Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning: This is a type of techniques that is used to
transfer knowledge learned from one language to another.
 Language Identification: Design language identification models to automatically
detect the language of a given text.
 Machine Translation: Machine Translation provides the facility to communicate and
inform access across language barriers and can be used as pre-processing step for
multilingual NLP tasks.
9. Reducing Uncertainty and False Positives in NLP
It is very crucial task to reduce uncertainty and false positives in Natural Language Process
(NLP) to improve the accuracy and reliability of the NLP models. Here are some key points
to approach the solution:
 Probabilistic Models: Use probabilistic models to figure out the uncertainty in
predictions. Probabilistic models such as Bayesian networks gives probabilistic
estimates of outputs that allow uncertainty quantification and better decision making.
 Confidence Scores: The confidence scores or probability estimates is calculated for
NLP predictions to assess the certainty of the output of the model. Confidence scores
helps us to identify cases where the model is uncertain or likely to produce false
positives.
 Threshold Tuning: For the classification tasks the decision thresholds is adjusted to
make the balance between sensitivity (recall) and specificity. False Positives in NLP
can be reduced by setting the appropriate thresholds.
 Ensemble Methods: Apply ensemble learning techniques to join multiple model to
reduce uncertainty.
10. Facilitating Continuous Conversations with NLP
Facilitating continuous conversations with NLP includes the development of system that
understands and responds to human language in real-time that enables seamless interaction
between users and machines. Implementing real time natural language processing pipelines
gives to capability to analyze and interpret user input as it is received involving algorithms
are optimized and systems for low latency processing to confirm quick responses to user
queries and inputs.
Building an NLP models that can maintain the context throughout a conversation. The
understanding of context enables systems to interpret user intent, conversation history
tracking, and generating relevant responses based on the ongoing dialogue. Apply intent
recognition algorithm to find the underlying goals and intentions expressed by users in
their messages.

How to overcome NLP Challenges

It requires a combination of innovative technologies, experts of domain, and
methodological approached to over the challenges in NLP. Here are some key points to
overcome the challenge of NLP tasks:
 Quantity and Quality of data: High quality of data and diverse data is used to train
the NLP algorithms effectively. Data augmentation, data synthesis, crowdsourcing are
the techniques to address data scarcity issues.
 Ambiguity: The NLP algorithm should be trained to disambiguate the words and
phrases.
 Out-of-vocabulary Words: The techniques are implemented to handle out-of-
vocabulary words such as tokenization, character-level modeling, and vocabulary
expansion.
 Lack of Annotated Data: Techniques such transfer learning and pre-training can be
used to transfer knowledge from large dataset to specific tasks with limited labeled
data.

Conclusion
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a transformative field within data science, offering
applications in areas like conversational agents, sentiment analysis, machine translation,
and information extraction. Understanding and overcoming the Challenges of Natural
Language Processing is crucial for businesses looking to leverage its power to drive
innovation and improve user interactions.

Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) is one of the largest Python libraries for performing
various Natural Language Processing tasks. From rudimentary tasks such as text pre-
processing to tasks like vectorized representation of text – NLTK’s API has covered
everything. In this article, we will accustom ourselves to the basics of NLTK and perform
some crucial NLP tasks: Tokenization, Stemming, Lemmatization, and POS Tagging.

Table of Content
 What is the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK)?
 Tokenization
 Stemming and Lemmatization
 Stemming
 Lemmatization
 Part of Speech Tagging

What is the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK)?

As discussed earlier, NLTK is Python’s API library for performing an array of tasks in
human language. It can perform a variety of operations on textual data, such as
classification, tokenization, stemming, tagging, Leparsing, semantic reasoning, etc.
Installation:
NLTK can be installed simply using pip or by running the following code.
! pip install nltk
Accessing Additional Resources:
To incorporate the usage of additional resources, such as recourses of languages other
than English – you can run the following in a python script. It has to be done only once
when you are running it for the first time in your system.
import nltk
nltk.download('all')
Now, having installed NLTK successfully in our system, let’s perform some basic
operations on text data using NLTK.

Tokenization
Tokenization refers to break down the text into smaller units. It entails splitting
paragraphs into sentences and sentences into words. It is one of the initial steps of any
NLP pipeline. Let us have a look at the two major kinds of tokenization that NLTK
provides:
Word Tokenization
It involves breaking down the text into words.
"I study Machine Learning on GeeksforGeeks." will be word-tokenized as
['I', 'study', 'Machine', 'Learning', 'on', 'GeeksforGeeks', '.'].
Sentence Tokenization
It involves breaking down the text into individual sentences.
Example:
"I study Machine Learning on GeeksforGeeks. Currently, I'm studying NLP"
will be sentence-tokenized as
['I study Machine Learning on GeeksforGeeks.', 'Currently, I'm studying NLP.']
In Python, both these tokenizations can be implemented in NLTK as follows:
# Tokenization using NLTK
from nltk import word_tokenize, sent_tokenize
sent = "GeeksforGeeks is a great learning platform.\
It is one of the best for Computer Science students."
print(word_tokenize(sent))
print(sent_tokenize(sent))
Output:
['GeeksforGeeks', 'is', 'a', 'great', 'learning', 'platform', '.',
'It', 'is', 'one', 'of', 'the', 'best', 'for', 'Computer', 'Science', 'students', '.']
['GeeksforGeeks is a great learning platform.',
'It is one of the best for Computer Science students.']

Stemming and Lemmatization

When working with Natural Language, we are not much interested in the form of words –
rather, we are concerned with the meaning that the words intend to convey. Thus, we try
to map every word of the language to its root/base form. This process is called
canonicalization.
E.g. The words ‘play’, ‘plays’, ‘played’, and ‘playing’ convey the same action – hence,
we can map them all to their base form i.e. ‘play’.
Now, there are two widely used canonicalization
techniques: Stemming and Lemmatization.

Stemming
Stemming generates the base word from the inflected word by removing the affixes of the
word. It has a set of pre-defined rules that govern the dropping of these affixes. It must be
noted that stemmers might not always result in semantically meaningful base
words. Stemmers are faster and computationally less expensive than lemmatizers.
In the following code, we will be stemming words using Porter Stemmer – one of the
most widely used stemmers:
from nltk.stem import PorterStemmer

# create an object of class PorterStemmer

porter = PorterStemmer()
print(porter.stem("play"))
print(porter.stem("playing"))
print(porter.stem("plays"))
print(porter.stem("played"))
Output:
play
play
play
play
We can see that all the variations of the word ‘play’ have been reduced to the same
word – ‘play’. In this case, the output is a meaningful word, ‘play’. However, this is not
always the case. Let us take an example.
Please note that these groups are stored in the lemmatizer; there is no removal of affixes
as in the case of a stemmer.
from nltk.stem import PorterStemmer
# create an object of class PorterStemmer
porter = PorterStemmer()
print(porter.stem("Communication"))
Output:
commun
The stemmer reduces the word ‘communication’ to a base word ‘commun’ which is
meaningless in itself.

Lemmatization
Lemmatization involves grouping together the inflected forms of the same word. This
way, we can reach out to the base form of any word which will be meaningful in nature.
The base from here is called the Lemma.
Lemmatizers are slower and computationally more expensive than stemmers.
Example:
'play', 'plays', 'played', and 'playing' have 'play' as the lemma.
In Python, both these tokenizations can be implemented in NLTK as follows:
from nltk.stem import WordNetLemmatizer
# create an object of class WordNetLemmatizer
lemmatizer = WordNetLemmatizer()
print(lemmatizer.lemmatize("plays", 'v'))
print(lemmatizer.lemmatize("played", 'v'))
print(lemmatizer.lemmatize("play", 'v'))
print(lemmatizer.lemmatize("playing", 'v'))
Output:
play
play
play
play
Please note that in lemmatizers, we need to pass the Part of Speech of the word along with
the word as a function argument.
Also, lemmatizers always result in meaningful base words. Let us take the same example
as we took in the case for stemmers.
from nltk.stem import WordNetLemmatizer

# create an object of class WordNetLemmatizer

lemmatizer = WordNetLemmatizer()
print(lemmatizer.lemmatize("Communication", 'v'))
Output:
Communication

Part of Speech Tagging

Part of Speech (POS) tagging refers to assigning each word of a sentence to its part of
speech. It is significant as it helps to give a better syntactic overview of a sentence.
Example:
"GeeksforGeeks is a Computer Science platform."
Let's see how NLTK's POS tagger will tag this sentence.
In Python, both these tokenizations can be implemented in NLTK as follows:
from nltk import pos_tag
from nltk import word_tokenize

text = "GeeksforGeeks is a Computer Science platform."

tokenized_text = word_tokenize(text)
tags = tokens_tag = pos_tag(tokenized_text)
tags
Output:
[('GeeksforGeeks', 'NNP'),
('is', 'VBZ'),
('a', 'DT'),
('Computer', 'NNP'),
('Science', 'NNP'),
('platform', 'NN'),
('.', '.')]

Conclusion
In conclusion, the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) works as a powerful Python library
that a wide range of tools for Natural Language Processing (NLP). From fundamental
tasks like text pre-processing to more advanced operations such as semantic reasoning,
NLTK provides a versatile API that caters to the diverse needs of language-related tasks.