Natural language processing (NLP) is the ability of a machine to analyze and understand human language. Human language has a very high amount of complexity, which makes parsing and understanding it difficult. There is a great deal of context in spoken and written language. Machines work well with precise rules that are within the confines of good context. With that said, it is still possible to gain an insight into text analysis using NLP techniques. An excellent example of this is Twitter sentiment analysis. Based on the contents of tweets, using NLP, it is possible to determine whether the sentiments of the people are generally positive or negative as a group. Another great example is the successful application of NLP techniques in analyzing customer reviews of a product or service.
The ML algorithms explored so far in this chapter...