NLP vs NLU vs. NLG: the differences between three natural language processing concepts

An NLU system can typically start with an arbitrary piece of text, but an NLG system begins with a well-controlled, detailed picture of the world. If you give an idea to an NLG system, the system synthesizes and transforms that idea into a sentence. It uses a combinatorial process of analytic output and contextualized outputs to complete these tasks. On the other hand, NLU is a higher-level subfield of NLP that focuses on understanding the meaning of natural language. It goes beyond just identifying the words in a sentence and their grammatical relationships. NLU aims to understand the intent, context, and emotions behind the words used in a text.

NLP can be used to integrate chatbots into websites, allowing users to interact with the business directly through their website. This will help improve customer satisfaction and save company costs by reducing the need for human employees who would otherwise be required to provide these services. These leverage artificial intelligence to make sense of complex data sets, generating written narratives accurately, quickly and at scale. To learn more about Yseop’s solutions and to better understand how this can translate to your business, please contact

Natural Language Generation (NLG): The vital component of NLP

It’s a subset of NLP and It works within it to assign structure, rules and logic to language so machines can “understand” what is being conveyed in the words, phrases and sentences in text. In order for systems to transform data into knowledge and insight that businesses can use for decision-making, process efficiency and more, machines need a deep understanding of text, and therefore, of natural language. On our quest to make more robust autonomous machines, it is imperative that we are able to not only process the input in the form of natural language, but also understand the meaning and context—that’s the value of NLU. This enables machines to produce more accurate and appropriate responses during interactions. As humans, we can identify such underlying similarities almost effortlessly and respond accordingly. 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.

Central to this understanding are word embeddings, such as Word2Vec or GloVe. These embeddings represent words in a continuous vector space, capturing semantic relationships. Words with similar meanings are located closer to each other in this vector space, forming a foundation for NLU systems to decipher the semantic roles and relationships of words within sentences.

Customer Frontlines

The future of NLP, NLU, and NLG is very promising, with many advancements in these technologies already being made and many more expected in the future. Our open source conversational AI platform includes NLU, and you can customize your pipeline in a modular way to extend the built-in functionality of Rasa’s NLU models. You can learn more about custom NLU components in the developer documentation, and be sure to check out this detailed tutorial. As we embrace this future, responsible development and collaboration among academia, industry, and regulators are crucial for shaping the ethical and transparent use of language-based AI. “I love eating ice cream” would be tokenized into [“I”, “love”, “eating”, “ice”, “cream”]. 6 min read – Explore why human resource departments should be at the center of your organization’s strategy for generative AI adoption.

Extractive summarization is the AI innovation powering Key Point Analysis used in That’s Debatable. Questionnaires about people’s habits and health problems are insightful while making diagnoses. Using symbolic AI, everything is visible, understandable and explained within a transparent box that delivers complete insight into how the logic was derived.

Natural language understanding is built atop machine learning

For example, programming languages including C, Java, Python, and many more were created for a specific reason. A natural language is one that has evolved over time via use and repetition. Latin, English, Spanish, and many other spoken languages are all languages that evolved naturally over time.

And AI-powered chatbots have become an increasingly popular form of customer service and communication. From answering customer queries to providing support, AI chatbots are solving several problems, and businesses are eager to adopt them. NLP attempts to analyze and understand the text of a given document, and NLU makes it possible to carry out a dialogue with a computer using natural language.

What is Natural Language Understanding (NLU)

The distinction between these two areas is important for designing efficient automated solutions and achieving more accurate and intelligent systems. 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.

From humble, rule-based beginnings to the might of neural behemoths, our approach to understanding language through machines has been a testament to both human ingenuity and persistent curiosity. Neri Van Otten is a machine learning and software engineer with over 12 years of Natural Language Processing (NLP) experience. Machines will aspire to understand language and engage in abstract and conceptual thinking, approaching a level of cognitive understanding reminiscent of human intelligence. This deeper comprehension will enable systems to reason, infer, and draw connections between pieces of information, ushering in a new era of AI capabilities. A long-term challenge remains to achieve a more profound cognitive understanding, where NLU systems comprehend text more abstractly and conceptually.

Logic is applied in the form of an IF-THEN structure embedded into the system by humans, who create the rules. This hard coding of rules can be used to manipulate the understanding of symbols. According to various industry estimates only about 20% of data collected is structured data.

NLU is widely used in virtual assistants, chatbots, and customer support systems. NLP finds applications in machine translation, text analysis, sentiment analysis, and document classification, among others. NLP systems learn language syntax through part-of-speech tagging and parsing. Accurate language processing aids information extraction and sentiment analysis.

The main objective of NLU is to enable machines to grasp the nuances of human language, including context, semantics, and intent. It involves various tasks such as entity recognition, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, and language classification. NLU algorithms leverage techniques like semantic analysis, syntactic parsing, and machine learning to extract relevant information from text or speech data and infer the underlying meaning. NLU is branch of natural language processing (NLP), which helps computers understand and interpret human language by breaking down the elemental pieces of speech. While speech recognition captures spoken language in real-time, transcribes it, and returns text, NLU goes beyond recognition to determine a user’s intent. Speech recognition is powered by statistical machine learning methods which add numeric structure to large datasets.

Upon successful determination of this, it can be used to filter out any irrelevant data for further processing. Instead, they want an answer as quickly as possible to make plans accordingly. NLP in AI plays around with the language we speak, to get something well-defined out of it. It could be as simple as to identify nouns from a sentence or as complex as to find out the emotions of people towards a movie, by processing the movie reviews. Simply put, a machine uses NLP models to read and understand the language a human speaks (this often gets referred to as NLP machine learning). I am an NLP practitioner and if you guys have read several other blogs with the same title and have still come here, I know you are greatly confused.

• Similarly, syntactic ambiguity, such as sentences like “I saw the man with the telescope,” presents additional complexity.
• Speakers of less commonly used languages will gain access to advanced NLU applications through crowdsourced data collection and community-driven efforts.
• Knowledge of that relationship and subsequent action helps to strengthen the model.
• Sentiment analysis, thus NLU, can locate fraudulent reviews by identifying the text’s emotional character.
• NLU and NLP work together in synergy, with NLU providing the foundation for understanding language and NLP complementing it by offering capabilities like translation, summarization, and text generation.

NLU, on the one hand, can interact with the computer using natural language. NLU is programmed to decipher command intent and provide precise outputs even if the input consists of mispronunciations in the sentence. A data capture application will enable users to enter information into fields on a web form using natural language pattern matching rather than typing out every area manually with their keyboard.

Before a computer can process unstructured text into a machine-readable format, first machines need to understand the peculiarities of the human language. It has made possible the development of conversational AI, chatbots, virtual assistants, and sentiment analysis systems that have become integral to our daily lives. Trying to meet customers on an individual level is difficult when the scale is so vast. Rather than using human resource to provide a tailored experience, NLU software can capture, process and react to the large quantities of unstructured data that customers provide at scale. There are 4.95 billion internet users globally, 4.62 billion social media users, and over two thirds of the world using mobile, and all of them will likely encounter and expect NLU-based responses.

Neri Van Otten is the founder of Spot Intelligence, a machine learning engineer with over 12 years of experience specialising in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and deep learning innovation. Conversational AI will become more natural and engaging, with chatbots and virtual assistants capable of holding longer, contextually rich, NLU will empower chatbots to handle complex inquiries, providing human-like companionship. Words and phrases can possess multiple meanings contingent on context, posing a formidable challenge to NLU systems. Disambiguating words or phrases accurately, particularly in situations where numerous interpretations exist, is an enduring challenge. NLU has evolved significantly over the years, thanks to advancements in machine learning, deep learning, and the availability of vast amounts of text data.

• NLU systems use a combination of machine learning and natural language processing techniques to analyze text and speech and extract meaning from it.
• NLP can study language and speech to do many things, but it can’t always understand what someone intends to say.
• In text extraction, pieces of text are extracted from the original document and put together into a shorter version while maintaining the same information content.

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