Natural language processing
(NLP) is the ability to extract insights from and literally understand
natural language within text, audio and images. Language and text hold
huge insight, and that data is often prevalent and widespread in
many organizations.
The ability to process
language systematically, effectively and at scale lends itself to
numerous applications across almost any organization with application to
customer-facing products and services and customer support through to
big
process changes in the back office. NLP applications can apply to
speech-to-text, text-to-speech, language translation, language
classification and categorization, named entity recognition, language
generation, automatic summarization, similarity assessment,
language logic and consistency, and more.
Why Deep Learning for NLP? One Word: BERT.
There have been a range of techniques applied to NLP, but deep learning, in particular, is showing some exceptional results. Deep learning has been applied to NLP for several years, and research and development breaks new ground so quickly that new methods and increasingly capable models are rapidly occurring. For example, FastText, an extension of Word2Vec, now significantly reduces the training load, which makes the application to a specific data set and language context much easier.
But a recent model
open-sourced by Google in October 2018, BERT (Bidirectional Encoder
Representations from Transformers, is now reshaping the NLP landscape.
BERT is significantly more evolved in its understanding of word
semantics given
its context and has an ability to process large amounts of text and
language. BERT also makes it easier to reuse a pretrained model
(transfer learning) and then fine-tune your data and the specific
language situation and problem you face.
Changing the NLP Benchmarks
Against many measures, BERT performance has improved language processing by a significant amount. In some circumstances, BERT can be applied directly to the data and problem with no further training (zero-shot training) and deliver a high-performing model.
Since BERT was published
last October, there has been a wave of transformer-based methods (GPT-2,
XLNet, RoBERTa) which keep raising the bar by demonstrating better
performance or easier training or some other specific benefit – for
instance, text/language generation. The performance level of BERT is
being likened as a moment in natural language processing akin to the
“ImageNet 2012 moment,” where a deep learning model demonstrated a big
uplift in performance and then led to a wave of
image-based deep learning applications and research.
We know we are onto a good
thing when the standard performance measures for language need to be
radically changed and uplifted because the new methods simply outperform
the old benchmarks! But while BERT is powerful and has reduced certain
barriers for use, as with other deep learning approaches, it still
needs to be fitted into a framework where the models can be more easily
used for real-world circumstances and deployed by a wider group of
organizations. This is a critical part of the deep
learning adoption cycle. The true benefits of NLP will only be realized
when there is broader adoption of these powerful models which operate
in and improve live scenarios, supporting a wide range of applications
across organizations and users.
You can check out this webinar to find out how BERT will power a wave of language-based applications.
About the Author
Rob Dalgety, industry expert at Peltarion, has extensive experience in commercializing and positioning software into enterprises and other organizations in areas including mobility, big data and analytics, collaboration and digital.
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