What Are the Differences Between NLU, NLP, and NLG?

NLU researchers and developers are trying to create a software that is capable of understanding language in the same way that humans understand it. While we have made major advancements in making machines understand context in natural language, we still have a long way to go. Knowing the rules and structure of the language, understanding the text without ambiguity are some of the challenges faced by NLU systems. NLG does exactly the opposite; given the data, it analyzes it and generates narratives in conversational language a human can understand. Denys spends his days trying to understand how machine learning will impact our daily lives—whether it’s building new models or diving into the latest generative AI tech. When he’s not leading courses on LLMs or expanding Voiceflow’s data science and ML capabilities, you can find him enjoying the outdoors on bike or on foot.

Its text analytics service offers insight into categories, concepts, entities, keywords, relationships, sentiment, and syntax from your textual data to help you respond to user needs quickly and efficiently. Help your business get on the right track to analyze and infuse your data at scale for AI. Natural language processing and its subsets have numerous practical applications within today’s world, like healthcare diagnoses or online customer service. Hence the breadth and depth of «understanding» aimed at by a system determine both the complexity of the system (and the implied challenges) and the types of applications it can deal with. The «breadth» of a system is measured by the sizes of its vocabulary and grammar.

In other words, when a customer asks a question, it will be the automated system that provides the answer, and all the agent has to do is choose which one is best. NLU enables chatbots to cover what would otherwise be a human shortcoming. For example, it is difficult for call center employees to remain consistently positive with customers at all hours of the day or night. However, a chatbot can maintain positivity and safeguard your brand’s reputation. 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.

NLU vs NLP in 2024: Main Differences & Use Cases Comparison

The «depth» is measured by the degree to which its understanding approximates that of a fluent native speaker. At the narrowest and shallowest, English-like command interpreters require minimal complexity, but have a small range of applications. Narrow but deep systems explore and model mechanisms of understanding,[25] but they still have limited application. Systems that are both very broad and very deep are beyond the current state of the art. ATNs and their more general format called «generalized ATNs» continued to be used for a number of years. NLG systems enable computers to automatically generate natural language text, mimicking the way humans naturally communicate — a departure from traditional computer-generated text.

• For example, the chatbot could say, “I’m sorry to hear you’re struggling with our service.
• Not only does this save customer support teams hundreds of hours, but it also helps them prioritize urgent tickets.
• If users deviate from the computer’s prescribed way of doing things, it can cause an error message, a wrong response, or even inaction.
• It’s a branch of cognitive science that endeavors to make deductions based on medical diagnoses or programmatically/automatically solve mathematical theorems.

Recommendations on Spotify or Netflix, auto-correct and auto-reply, virtual assistants, and automatic email categorization, to name just a few. Simply put, using previously gathered and analyzed information, computer programs are able to generate conclusions. For example, in medicine, machines can infer a diagnosis based on previous diagnoses using IF-THEN deduction rules. NLU makes it possible to carry out a dialogue with a computer using a human-based language.

For example, ask customers questions and capture their answers using Access Service Requests (ASRs) to fill out forms and qualify leads. Natural language understanding (NLU) uses the power of machine learning to convert speech to text and analyze its intent during any interaction. It can range from a simple solution like rule based string matching to an extremely complex solution like understanding nlu meaning the implicit context behind the sentence and then extracting the entity based on the context. Gartner predicts that, as soon as 2025, around a third of businesses will use a conversation platform in customer service. When an unfortunate incident occurs, customers file a claim to seek compensation. As a result, insurers should take into account the emotional context of the claims processing.

Empowering the digital-first business professional in the foundation model era

The technology sorts through mispronunciations, lousy grammar, misspelled words, and sentences to determine a person’s actual intent. To do this, NLU has to analyze words, syntax, and the context and intent behind the words. NLP takes input text in the form of natural language, converts it into a computer language, processes it, and returns the information as a response in a natural language.

With the outbreak of deep learning,CNN,RNN,LSTM Have become the latest «rulers.» Natural language has no general rules, and you can always find many exceptions. 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.

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) connects with human communication’s deeper meanings and purposes, such as feelings, objectives, or motivation. It employs AI technology and algorithms, supported by massive data stores, to interpret human language. To understand such many different expressions is a challenge to the machine. In the past, machines could only deal with «structured data» (such as keywords), which means that if you want to understand what people are talking about, you must enter the precise instructions. Machines may be able to read information, but comprehending it is another story.

Natural Language Processing (NLP): 7 Key Techniques

After all, different sentences can mean the same thing, and, vice versa, the same words can mean different things depending on how they are used. Essentially, NLP processes what was said or entered, while NLU endeavors to understand what was meant. The intent of what people write or say can be distorted through misspelling, fractured sentences, and mispronunciation. NLU pushes through such errors to determine the user’s intent, even if their written or spoken language is flawed. People and machines routinely exchange information via voice or text interface.

The greater the capability of NLU models, the better they are in predicting speech context. In fact, one of the factors driving the development of ai chip devices with larger model training sizes is the relationship between the NLU model’s increased computational capacity and effectiveness (e.g GPT-3). The verb that precedes it, swimming, provides additional context to the reader, allowing us to conclude that we are referring to the flow of water in the ocean. 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. In 1971, Terry Winograd finished writing SHRDLU for his PhD thesis at MIT. SHRDLU could understand simple English sentences in a restricted world of children’s blocks to direct a robotic arm to move items.

This is useful for consumer products or device features, such as voice assistants and speech to text. Depending upon the application, there can be a large variety of entity types. For example, in news articles, entities could be people, places, companies, and organizations. Let’s revisit our previous example where we asked our music assist bot to “play Coldplay”.

Natural language generation (NLG) is a process within natural language processing that deals with creating text from data. Natural language understanding means that the machine is like a human being, and has the ability to understand the language of a normal person. Because natural language has many difficulties in understanding (detailed below), NLU is still far from human performance.

NLP is an area of Artificial Intelligence focused on turning speech into structured data. The aim is to turn human language – which is disorderly and poorly defined – into forms of data that a machine can easily process. It enables computers to evaluate and organize unstructured text or speech input in a meaningful way that is equivalent to both spoken and written human language. In addition to making chatbots more conversational, AI and NLU are being used to help support reps do their jobs better. NLU systems use these three steps to analyze a text and extract its meaning.

As a result, if insurance companies choose to automate claims processing with chatbots, they must be certain of the chatbot’s emotional and NLU skills. For instance, the address of the home a customer wants to cover has an impact on the underwriting process since it has a relationship with burglary risk. NLP-driven machines can automatically extract data from questionnaire forms, and risk can be calculated seamlessly. Gone are the days when chatbots could only produce programmed and rule-based interactions with their users. Back then, the moment a user strayed from the set format, the chatbot either made the user start over or made the user wait while they find a human to take over the conversation. NLU can greatly help journalists and publishers extract answers to complex questions from deep within content using natural language interaction with content archives.

Interpretability vs Explainability: The Black Box of Machine Learning

One way or another, most businesses market their high-level customer service standards. Almost everyone – 96% of customers – say that customer service plays a key role in the choice of (and loyalty to) brands. Before booking a hotel, customers want to learn more about the potential accommodations. People start asking questions about the pool, dinner service, towels, and other things as a result. Such tasks can be automated by an NLP-driven hospitality chatbot (see Figure 7). For example, in NLU, various ML algorithms are used to identify the sentiment, perform Name Entity Recognition (NER), process semantics, etc.

As a result, they do not require both excellent NLU skills and intent recognition. Intent recognition and sentiment analysis are the main outcomes of the NLU. Thus, it helps businesses to understand customer needs and offer them personalized products. According to various industry estimates only about 20% of data collected is structured data. The remaining 80% is unstructured data—the majority of which is unstructured text data that’s unusable for traditional methods.

False patient reviews can hurt both businesses and those seeking treatment. Sentiment analysis, thus NLU, can locate fraudulent reviews by identifying the text’s emotional character. For instance, inflated statements and an excessive amount of punctuation may indicate a fraudulent review. Questionnaires about people’s habits and health problems are insightful while making diagnoses.

As a result, algorithms search for associations and correlations to infer what the sentence’s most likely meaning is rather than understanding the genuine meaning of human languages. Many machines have trouble understanding the subtleties of human language. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. If users deviate from the computer’s prescribed way of doing things, it can cause an error message, a wrong response, or even inaction. However, solutions like the Expert.ai Platform have language disambiguation capabilities to extract meaningful insight from unstructured language data. Through a multi-level text analysis of the data’s lexical, grammatical, syntactical, and semantic meanings, the machine will provide a human-like understanding of the text and information that’s the most useful to you. Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of computer science, artificial intelligence, and linguistics concerned with the interactions between machines and human (natural) languages.

NLU allows machines to understand human interaction by using algorithms to reduce human speech into structured definitions and concepts for understanding relationships. These approaches are also commonly used in data mining to understand consumer attitudes. In particular, sentiment analysis enables brands to monitor their customer feedback more closely, allowing them to cluster positive and negative social media comments and track net promoter scores. By reviewing comments with negative sentiment, companies are able to identify and address potential problem areas within their products or services more quickly.

But will machines ever be able to understand — and respond appropriately to — a person’s emotional state, nuanced tone, or understated intentions? The science supporting this breakthrough capability is called natural-language understanding (NLU). NLU provides support by understanding customer requests and quickly routing them to the appropriate team member. Because NLU grasps the interpretation and implications of various customer requests, it’s a precious tool for departments such as customer service or IT.

Everything you need to know about NLUs whether you’re a Developer, Researcher, or Business Owner.

While both understand human language, NLU communicates with untrained individuals to learn and understand their intent. In addition to understanding words and interpreting meaning, NLU is programmed to understand meaning, despite common human errors, such as mispronunciations or transposed letters and words. A basic form of NLU is called parsing, which takes written text and converts it into a structured format for computers to understand. Instead of relying on computer language syntax, NLU enables a computer to comprehend and respond to human-written text. Some of the most prominent use of NLU is in chatbots and virtual assistants where NLU has gained recent success.

Statistical intent classification is based on Machine Learning algorithms. Statistical classification methods are faster to train, require less human effort to maintain, and are more accurate. However, they are more expensive and less flexible than rule-based classification. The platform is able to understand the request of the user, a Travel Insurance Package to Berlin from Nov 28 — Dec 9. The platform can verify further information like Age, Email, etc… to best decide the package.

It has the potential to not only shorten support cycles but make them more accurate by being able to recommend solutions or identify pressing priorities for department teams. Typical computer-generated content will lack the aspects of human-generated content that make it engaging and exciting, like emotion, fluidity, and personality. However, NLG technology makes it possible for computers to produce humanlike text that emulates human writers. This process starts by identifying a document’s main topic and then leverages NLP to figure out how the document should be written in the user’s native language. If you want to achieve a question and answer, you must build on the understanding of multiple rounds of dialogue, natural language understanding is an essential ability.

Because the key to dealing with natural language is to let computers «understand» natural language, natural language processing is also called natural language understanding (NLU, Natural). On the one hand, it is a branch of language information processing, on the other hand it is one of the core topics of artificial intelligence (AI). When considering AI capabilities, many think of natural language processing (NLP) — the process of breaking down language into a format that’s understandable and useful for computers and humans. However, the stage where the computer actually “understands” the information is called natural language understanding (NLU). Speech recognition uses NLU techniques to let computers understand questions posed with natural language. NLU is used to give the users of the device a response in their natural language, instead of providing them a list of possible answers.

If not – if you already run the perfect business – customers are going to make that decision for you in the next few years. As we’ve already seen, expectations for easy-to-use tools are growing every day. If you’re offering customers a dated and hard-to-use DTMF system, that quickly undercuts the image you’re trying to present. Since then, with the help of progress made in the field of AI and specifically in NLP and NLU, we have come very far in this quest. The first successful attempt came out in 1966 in the form of the famous ELIZA program which was capable of carrying on a limited form of conversation with a user. In the world of AI, for a machine to be considered intelligent, it must pass the Turing Test.

With BMC, he supports the AMI Ops Monitoring for Db2 product development team. Bharat holds Masters in Data Science and Engineering from BITS, Pilani. His current active areas of research are conversational AI and algorithmic bias in AI.

Each NLU following the intent-utterance model uses slightly different terminology and format of this dataset but follows the same principles. Entities or slots, are typically pieces of information that you want to capture from a users. In our previous example, we might have a user intent of shop_for_item but want to capture what kind of item it is. For example, an NLU might be trained on billions of English phrases ranging from the weather to cooking recipes and everything in between. If you’re building a bank app, distinguishing between credit card and debit cards may be more important than types of pies. To help the NLU model better process financial-related tasks you would send it examples of phrases and tasks you want it to get better at, fine-tuning its performance in those areas.

Ecommerce websites rely heavily on sentiment analysis of the reviews and feedback from the users—was a review positive, negative, or neutral? Here, they need to know what was said and they also need to understand what was meant. NLP can process text from grammar, structure, typo, and point of view—but it will be NLU that will help the machine infer the intent behind the language text. So, even though there are many overlaps between NLP and NLU, this differentiation sets them distinctly apart. NLP focuses on processing the text in a literal sense, like what was said.

Natural Language Understanding Applications are becoming increasingly important in the business world. NLUs require specialized skills in the fields of AI and machine learning and this can prevent development teams that lack the time and resources to add NLP capabilities to their applications. Business applications often rely on NLU to understand what people are saying in both spoken and written language. This data helps virtual assistants and other applications determine a user’s intent and route them to the right task. Explore some of the latest NLP research at IBM or take a look at some of IBM’s product offerings, like Watson Natural Language Understanding.