NLU: What It Is & Why It Matters

While NLP tries to understand a command via voice data or text, NLU on the other hand helps facilitate a dialog with the computer through natural language. Both NLU and NLP are capable of understanding human language; NLU can interact with even untrained individuals to decipher their intent. Sure, NLU is programmed in a way that it can understand the meaning even if there are human errors such as mispronunciations or transposed words. Though NLG is also a subset of NLP, there is a more distinct difference when it comes to human interaction. Usually, computer-generated content is straight, robotic, and lacks any kind of engagement. The primary role of NLG is to make the response more fluid, engaging, and interesting as an actual human would do.

The noun it describes, version, denotes multiple iterations of a report, enabling us to determine that we are referring to the most up-to-date status of a file. Automated reasoning is a subfield science that is used to automatically prove mathematical theorems or make logical inferences about a medical diagnosis. It gives machines a form of reasoning or logic, and allows them to infer new facts by deduction. Businesses like restaurants, hotels, and retail stores use tickets for customers to report problems with services or products they’ve purchased. For example, a restaurant receives a lot of customer feedback on its social media pages and email, relating to things such as the cleanliness of the facilities, the food quality, or the convenience of booking a table online.

So, you’ve figured out NLP but what’s NLU?

NLU often involves incorporating external knowledge sources, such as ontologies, knowledge graphs, or commonsense databases, to enhance understanding. The technology also utilizes semantic role labeling (SRL) to identify the roles and relationships of words or phrases in a sentence with respect to a specific predicate. NLP, with its focus on language structure and statistical patterns, enables machines to analyze, manipulate, and generate human language.

Additionally, NLU systems can use machine learning algorithms to learn from past experience and improve their understanding of natural language. Alexa is exactly that, allowing users to input commands through voice instead of typing them in. Your NLU software takes a statistical sample of recorded calls and performs speech recognition after transcribing the calls to text via MT (machine translation). The NLU-based text analysis links specific speech patterns to both negative emotions and high effort levels.

Language Generation

NLU is the final step in NLP that involves a machine learning process to create an automated system capable of interpreting human input. This requires creating a model that has been trained on labelled training data, including what is being said, who said it and when they said it (the context). Instead, we use a mixture of LSTM (Long-Short-Term-Memory), GRU (Gated Recurrent Units) and CNN (Convolutional Neural Networks). The advantage of using this combination of models – instead of traditional machine learning approaches – is that we can identify how the words are being used and how they are connected to each other in a given sentence.

These notions are connected and often used interchangeably, but they stand for different aspects of language processing and understanding. Distinguishing between NLP and NLU is essential for researchers and developers to create appropriate AI solutions for business automation tasks. Speech recognition is an integral component of NLP, which incorporates AI and machine learning. Here, NLP algorithms are used to understand natural speech in order to carry out commands. The algorithms we mentioned earlier contribute to the functioning of natural language generation, enabling it to create coherent and contextually relevant text or speech. Natural Language Understanding in AI aims to understand the context in which language is used.

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