Natural language processing basics

Before we state some of the high-level steps involved in NLP, it is important to establish a definition of NLP. In simple terms, NLP is a collection of processes, algorithms, and tools used by intelligent systems to interpret text data written in human language for actionable insights. The mention of text data makes one fact about NLP very evident. NLP is all about interpreting unstructured data. NLP organizes unstructured text data and uses sophisticated methods to solve a plethora of problems, such as sentiment analysis, document classification, and text summarization. In this section, we will talk about some of the basic steps involved in NLP.

In the subsequent sections, we will take a deep dive into those steps. The following diagram represents some of the basics hierarchical steps involved in NLP:

Let us look at each of these steps briefly:

• Type of machine learning: NLP can be performed either using supervised learning algorithms or as unsupervised learning...