Natural Language Understanding

In this chapter, we will explore recipes that will allow us to interpret and understand the text contained in short as well as long passages. Natural language understanding (NLU) is a very broad term and the various systems developed as part of NLU do not interpret or understand a passage of text the same way a human reader would. However, based on the specificity of the task, we can create some applications that can be combined to generate an interpretation or understanding that can be used to solve a given problem related to text processing.

Organizations that have a huge document corpus need a seamless way to search through documents. More specifically, what users really need is an answer to a specific question without having to glean through a list of documents that are returned as part of a document search. Users would prefer the query to be formulated as a question in natural language and the answer to be emitted in the same manner.

Another...