Question: what is the reason behind natural language processing

Maja Popovic answered on 22 Jan 2020:

Natural Language Processing is a big field, there are many, many applications.
To name a few:
— speech recognition: instead of a person writing down everything that someone is saying, it can be done by a computer;
— text classification: one can automatically classify texts according to topic, for example if you want only news about sports and you don’t care about other topics, a computer can find those for you
— machine translation: if you don’t understand some language but you would like to know what is written, a computer can translate it for you. It is not good as human translation, but it is good enough for you to figure out what the text is about
— if you want to talk to an electronic personal assistant, like Alexa, Siri, etc, this device has to understand what you said
— you might want to know in which language some text is written, and a computer can do it for you
— text summarisation: you might want to know only a few important facts from a long text