Natural language processing (NLP) is a part of wide artificial intelligence that allows computers (software) to understand the text and spoken language and may be used for various business applications, including search engines, spam filters, or machine translation. One of the most popular techniques used in NLP is the Named Entity Recognition (NER) that is basically based on two important elements – pre-defined grammar rules and human supervision. This technique is especially useful if you are looking for specific content such a people or financial data. NLP, however, offers much more than that. It can be used for text summarization or linking different data sources, however, some of the applications are still under development and may not always be fully effective.
As we have mentioned above the natural language processing may be used for various tasks, including automation, data extraction, or classification. Or all of them at once. If your company is using a lot of data that is structured or unstructured (that can be understood as not arranged in line with a pre-defined model) you should consider using NLP to make it more transparent and useful for your organization. NLP tool can help you find relevant data, store and archive it, and ‘call’ at any moment you need it in seconds (or at least minutes if it is a long and complex document). Such software may be also able to categorize and classify relevant documents in line with the pre-defined rules, e.g. financial statements, employment agreements, and so on.
Let’s imagine a scenario. The management board of your company is expecting relevant data about the outcomes of its meetings from the last three years. Time is short as the audit is waiting for the information to provide the opinion to the regulator. No doubt that such a situation is quite stressful for all people in the organization. One way of completing this task is to open all the minutes from the last three years and screen every document manually and then write certain information in another file. Repeat it 100 times. Time-consuming, boring, and prone to human errors.
Another way to do it is to engage an NLP tool to make it faster and more effective. The AI-based solution will go through all documents and search for relevant keywords and/or phrases and therefore will either highlight a document and information or even propose a summary of the text. The choice is yours. You will save time, stress, and money.
The sooner the better. To make the NLP tool more effective and prepared for new challenges you should consider engaging your team in teaching the model and providing feedback. It takes some time and effort to ensure that the model is working just as your organization needs, however, in the end, you will earn much more. With some additional effort, you may also receive useful information that was not clear or even visible to you before. Interested? Make the initial assessment of your needs and consider AI.
