Understanding Text with Natural Language Processing

This weeks post is on Natural Language Processing, a computer science field that is now closely linked into the Data Science and Machine Learning worlds, especially since the explosion of AI. Natural Language Processing is the concept of analysing natural language, wether thats text, speech or whatever, and giving it some meaning specifically to aid with human and computer interaction. Essentially, it is trying to quantify grammers, words or phrases so that word types, relationships and even sentiment can be identified. The Stanford NLP team have done some great work within this area and have produced some fantastic products that give you as a developer, data scientist or the ability to extract meaning from human language, programatically! I used the Stanford Core NLP recently to analyse technology papers from the internet to pull out contextual information such as peoples names mentioned in the document, companies and even monetary values and indexed them within Elasticsearch along with the original document.