NLP: How Machines Understand Human Language
Question?
Have you ever wondered how your phone's voice assistant, like Siri or Alexa, seems to understand your
commands so effortlessly? It's not magic – it's Natural Language Processing (NLP) at work.
Imagine asking, "What's the weather today?" To deliver a response, your device goes through a series of
intricate steps:
● Speech Recognition (Automatic Speech Recognition - ASR): Converts your spoken words into
text.
○ Example: "What’s the weather today?" → Text Output: "What’s the weather today?"
● Natural Language Understanding (NLU): Deciphers the meaning behind your words, identifying
your intent (getting the weather) and key information ("weather," "today").
● Query Processing & Response Generation: Accesses a weather database or API to retrieve the
relevant information.
● Natural Language Generation (NLG) & Speech Synthesis: Turns the data into a natural-sounding
spoken response.
○ Example Response: "Today’s temperature is 25°C with clear skies."
So, what seems like a simple conversation is actually a complex process involving multiple AI techniques,
from speech recognition to understanding language and generating meaningful responses.
Definition of Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a subfield of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computational
Linguistics that focuses on the interaction between computers and human (natural) languages. It
involves the development of algorithms and models that enable machines to process, understand,
generate, and respond to text or speech in a meaningful way.
Formally, NLP can be defined as the computational techniques for analyzing and synthesizing natural
language, based on linguistic and statistical principles, to enable machine-human communication.
Why is NLP Challenging?
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is difficult because human language is complex, ambiguous,
context-dependent, and constantly evolving. Unlike simple keyword matching, NLP requires machines to
break down text, extract meaning, and interpret context using advanced computational techniques. Let’s
first understand these core challenges before diving into why NLP is so difficult.
1. Ambiguity in Language
Ambiguity means that a word, phrase, or sentence can have multiple meanings. Humans use experience
and context to resolve ambiguity, but machines struggle because they lack inherent understanding.
Types of Ambiguity:
a. Lexical Ambiguity (Word-Level Ambiguity)
When a single word has multiple meanings depending on the context. Example:
● "I saw a bat in the cave." (Bat = flying animal or a baseball bat?)
● "She left her glasses on the table." (Glasses = drinking glasses or spectacles?)
A simple keyword-based system cannot determine the meaning, but an NLP system uses Word
Sense Disambiguation (WSD) to identify the correct sense based on context.
b. Syntactic Ambiguity (Sentence Structure Ambiguity)
When a sentence can have multiple valid interpretations due to its structure. Example: Flying
planes can be dangerous."
● “Are planes that fly dangerous?”
● “Or is flying them dangerous?”
Machines struggle because sentence structures do not always follow strict rules. Parsing
techniques like dependency parsing help in resolving such ambiguities.
c. Referential Ambiguity (Pronoun Reference Ambiguity): When it is unclear who or what a
pronoun refers to. Example:
● "John told Mike he won the award."
(Who won the award—John or Mike?)
● "Lisa gave Sarah her book."
(Whose book is it—Lisa’s or Sarah’s?)
Machines need Coreference Resolution to determine the correct references in a sentence.
2. Context Dependence in Language
The meaning of words changes based on the surrounding context. Humans can infer context easily, but
machines struggle with:
a. Polysemy (Words with Multiple Meanings Based on Context. Example: "Bank"
● Financial context: "I deposited money in the bank."
● Geographical context: "He sat by the river bank."
NLP models like BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) use contextual
embeddings to determine meaning.
b. Conversational Context: When speaking, we often drop information because it is understood
from the conversation. Voice Assistants Example:
● User: "Who is the President of the USA?"
● Assistant: "Donald Trump."
● User: "How old is he?"
● (The system must infer that "he" refers to Donald Trump.)
Machines use dialogue history tracking to maintain context.
3. Constantly Evolving Language
Human language is dynamic—new words, slang, and phrases emerge frequently, making NLP models
outdated quickly.
a. Slang & Informal Language. Example:
● "That movie was lit!"
○ ("Lit" means amazing, not literally burning.)
● "I’ll hit you up later."
○ ("Hit up" means contact, not physical hitting.)
NLP models trained on formal text struggle with informal speech, so continuous learning is
needed.
b. New Words and Trends
● "COVID-19" did not exist in NLP datasets before 2020, but it became a globally used
term.
● New Technologies & Trends: Words like "metaverse" and "NFTs" emerged recently.
NLP models require constant retraining to stay updated with new vocabulary.
Why is NLP Challenging?
Now that we understand ambiguity, context dependence, and evolving language, let’s see why NLP is
difficult:
Why These Challenges Make NLP Difficult:
● Multiple Word Meanings: "Apple" (fruit or company).
● Idioms and Sarcasm: "Break a leg!" or "That’s just great!" (sarcasm).
● Grammar Exceptions: Inconsistent rules across languages.
● Lack of Common Sense: Machines need explicit training for common knowledge.
● Robust Real-World Applications: Search engines, chatbots, and machine translation require
advanced NLP.
How NLP Overcomes These Challenges?
● Word Embeddings (Word2Vec, GloVe, BERT, GPT-3) – Help capture word meanings based on
context.
● Transformer Models (BERT, GPT-4, T5) – Consider the entire sentence instead of isolated words.
● Coreference Resolution & Dependency Parsing – Identify references and sentence structures.
● Transfer Learning & Continuous Training – Keep NLP models updated with new words and
trends.
