New Frontiers in Natural Language Processing: Sentiment Analysis Is the Key to New Insights

Natural language processing (NLP) is a technology spawned from the need for machines to understand and communicate with humans in human language, not formal computer languages. The concept behind NLP is simple: if and when machines can understand and communicate with humans in natural (human) language, it democratizes data science, enabling humans to access, analyze, and leverage data more intelligently and become more efficient as they offload redundant, data-heavy tasks to machines. NLP is most commonly understood as a user interface (UI) technology, enabling two-way communications with computers via speech or text. However, NLP is also a critical technology for extracting insights and analysis from a vast amount of previously unindexed and unstructured data; mining video and audio files, emails, scanned documents, and more. NLP adoption is accelerating, but not because of the creation of new NLP algorithms, as the data science in that regard is mature.