What Is Natural Language Understanding?

Text analysis solutions enable machines to automatically understand the content of customer support tickets and route them to the correct departments without employees having to open every single ticket. Not only does this save customer support teams hundreds of hours,it also helps them prioritize urgent tickets. Natural language understanding is a branch of AI that understands sentences using text or speech. NLU allows machines to understand human interaction by using algorithms to reduce human speech into structured definitions and concepts for understanding relationships.

Additionally, statistical machine learning and deep learning techniques are typically used to improve accuracy and flexibility of the language processing models. With NLU, conversational interfaces can understand and respond to human language. They use techniques like segmenting words and sentences, recognizing grammar, and semantic knowledge to infer intent. Natural language understanding (NLU) technology plays a crucial role in customer experience management. By allowing machines to comprehend human language, NLU enables chatbots and virtual assistants to interact with customers more naturally, providing a seamless and satisfying experience.

Virtual Assistants

Here is a benchmark article by SnipsAI, AI voice platform, comparing F1-scores, a measure of accuracy, of different conversational AI providers. It is best to compare the performances of different solutions by using objective nlu definition metrics. For example, a recent Gartner report points out the importance of NLU in healthcare. NLU helps to improve the quality of clinical care by improving decision support systems and the measurement of patient outcomes.

As demonstrated in the video below, mortgage chatbots can also gather, validate, and evaluate data. Let’s illustrate this example by using a famous NLP model called Google Translate. As seen in Figure 3, Google translates the Turkish proverb “Damlaya damlaya göl olur.” as “Drop by drop, it becomes a lake.” This is an exact word by word translation of the sentence. Many voice interactions are short phrases, and the speaker needs to recognize not only what the user is saying, but also the user’s intention.

How does natural language understanding work?

In order to help corporate executives raise the possibility that their chatbot investments will be successful, we address NLU-related questions in this article. It understands the actual request and facilitates a speedy response from the right person or team (e.g., help desk, legal, sales). This provides customers and employees with timely, accurate information they can rely on so that you can focus efforts where it matters most. Over 60% say they would purchase more from companies they felt cared about them.

The grammatical correctness/incorrectness of a phrase doesn’t necessarily correlate with the validity of a phrase. There can be phrases that are grammatically correct yet meaningless, and phrases that are grammatically incorrect yet have meaning. In order to distinguish the most meaningful aspects of words, NLU applies a variety of techniques intended to pick up on the meaning of a group of words with less reliance on grammatical structure and rules.

And, through training, the machine can also automatically extract “Shanghai” in the sentence, these two words refer to the concept of the destination (ie, the entity); “Next Tuesday” refers to the departure time. This is particularly important, given the scale of unstructured text that is generated on an everyday basis. NLU-enabled technology will be needed to get the most out of this information, and save you time, money and energy to respond in a way that consumers will appreciate. The voice assistant uses the framework of Natural Language Processing to understand what is being said, and it uses Natural Language Generation to respond in a human-like manner. There is Natural Language Understanding at work as well, helping the voice assistant to judge the intention of the question. Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a field of computer science which analyzes what human language means, rather than simply what individual words say.

NLU’s profound impact lies in its ability to derive meaningful knowledge from textual data, granting businesses a competitive edge in understanding customer feedback, market trends, and emerging sentiments. NLU, however, stands out by interpreting and making sense of the input it receives. Its primary goal is to comprehend human language comprehensively, enabling machines to glean valuable insights and respond intelligently.

Common devices and platforms where NLU is used to communicate with users include smartphones, home assistants, and chatbots. These systems can perform tasks such as scheduling appointments, answering customer support inquiries, or providing helpful information in a conversational format. Natural Language Understanding is a crucial component of modern-day technology, enabling machines to understand human language and communicate effectively with users. In both intent and entity recognition, a key aspect is the vocabulary used in processing languages. The system has to be trained on an extensive set of examples to recognize and categorize different types of intents and entities.