MACHINE LEARNING
However , if a business is struggling to picture where NLP will fit into its work , it should be considered that the technology is much further reaching than the more recently developed smart assistants . Everything from search , email spam filtering , online translation , grammar and spell checking , plus many other applications use NLP . Any kind of machine learning done involving natural language will involve some form of NLP .
Shivvy Jervis , Trends Forecaster and CEO of Futurescape 248 , touches on bias as one concern . “ If there is any racist or sexist bias in society , this could produce data reflecting this , which can exacerbate problems and is particularly troublesome in security , policing , health and employment . However , handled correctly , it is an extremely useful tool for increasing productivity and security and enabling businesses to run efficiently and at lower cost ”.
Trends sub More and more types of business are starting to see the benefits of NLP and although budgets have been hit hard by the pandemic , budgets for it are 10 % higher compared to 2019 . The latest trends point towards applications that require limited labeled data and simplified processes that make NLP accessible to everyone .
Transfer learning is a machine learning technique where a model is trained for one task and repurposed for a second that ’ s related to the first one . This means there is no need to build a model from scratch , which is expensive , time-consuming and requires large amounts of data , and NLP tasks can be completed faster using smaller amounts of labeled data .
“ [ Use cases for NLP ] can be from automatically converting a scanned document into a text file , deciding what movie to recommend to you next , or deciding future education , finances or opportunities ”
DR GARFIELD BENJAMIN POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCHER , SOLENT UNIVERSITY
62 August 2021