The 10 Biggest Issues in Natural Language Processing NLP

Natural-Language-Processing

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NLP can enrich the OCR process by recognizing certain concepts in the resulting editable text. For example, you might use OCR to convert printed financial records into digital form and an NLP algorithm to anonymize the records by stripping away proper nouns. The answer to each of those questions is a tentative YES—assuming you have quality data to train your model throughout the development process. Thus far, we have seen three problems linked to the bag of words approach and introduced three techniques for improving the quality of features. Applying stemming to our four sentences reduces the plural “kings” to its singular form “king”. We’ve made good progress in reducing the dimensionality of the training data, but there is more we can do.

  • Data mining challenges involve the question of ethics in data collection to quite a degree.
  • Autocorrect, autocomplete, predict analysis text are some of the examples of utilizing Predictive Text Entry Systems.
  • Medication adherence is the most studied drug therapy problem and co-occurred with concepts related to patient-centered interventions targeting self-management.
  • It also means that only the root words need to be stored in a database, rather than every possible conjugation of every word.
  • Healthcare data is often messy, incomplete, and difficult to process, so the fact that NLP algorithms rely on large amounts of high-quality data to learn patterns and make accurate predictions makes ensuring data quality critical.
  • Srihari [129] explains the different generative models as one with a resemblance that is used to spot an unknown speaker’s language and would bid the deep knowledge of numerous languages to perform the match.


Part I highlights the needs that led us to update the morphological engine AraMorph in order to optimize its morpho-syntactic analysis. Even if the engine has been optimized, a digital lexical source for better use of the system is still lacking. Part II presents a methodology exploiting the internal structure of the Arabic lexicographic encyclopaedia Lisān al-ʿarab, which allows automatic extraction of the roots and derived lemmas. The outcome of this work is a useful resource for morphological analysis of Arabic, either in its own right, or to enrich already existing resources. This software works with almost 186 languages, including Thai, Korean, Japanese, and others not so widespread ones.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) – Challenges


Wojciech enjoys working with small teams where the quality of the code and the project’s direction are essential. In the long run, this allows him to have a broad understanding of the subject, develop personally and look for challenges. Additionally, Wojciech is interested in Big Data tools, making him a perfect candidate for various Data-Intensive Application implementations. It is inspiring to see new strategies like multilingual transformers and sentence embeddings that aim to account for

language differences and identify the similarities between various languages. This breaks up long-form content and allows for further analysis based on component phrases (noun phrases, verb phrases,

prepositional phrases, and others). Collaborations between NLP experts and humanitarian actors may help identify additional challenges that need to be addressed to guarantee safety and ethical soundness in humanitarian NLP.

What are the three problems of natural language specification?


However, specifying the requirements in natural language has one major drawback, namely the inherent imprecision, i.e., ambiguity, incompleteness, and inaccuracy, of natural language.

Natural language processing has roots in linguistics, computer science, and machine learning and has been around for more than 50 years (almost as long as the modern-day computer!). If you’ve ever used a translation app, had predictive text spell that tricky word for you, or said the words, “Alexa, what’s the weather like tomorrow?” then you’ve enjoyed the products of natural language processing. Pinyin input methods did actually exist when Wubi was popular, but at the time had very limited intelligence. Users had to select the correct Chinese characters from a large number of homophones. In the last two years, the use of deep learning has significantly improved speech and image recognition rates. Computers have therefore done quite well at the perceptual intelligence level, in some classic tests reaching or exceeding the average level of human beings.

Domain-specific Knowledge


While advances within natural language processing are certainly promising, there are specific challenges that need consideration. Natural language processing assists businesses to offer more immediate customer service with improved response times. Regardless of the time of day, both customers and prospective leads will receive direct answers to their queries. By utilizing market intelligence services, organizations can identify those end-user search queries that are both current and relevant to the marketplace, and add contextually appropriate data to the search results. As a result, it can provide meaningful information to help those organizations decide which of their services and products to discontinue or what consumers are currently targeting.

challenges in natural language processing

NLP models rely on large datasets to make accurate predictions, so if these datasets are incomplete or contain inaccurate data, the model may not perform as expected. One of the biggest challenges is that NLP systems are often limited by their lack of understanding of the context in which language is used. For example, a machine may not be metadialog.com able to understand the nuances of sarcasm or humor. Lastly, natural language generation is a technique used to generate text from data. Natural language generators can be used to generate reports, summaries, and other forms of text. Developing those datasets takes time and patience, and may call for expert-level annotation capabilities.

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Recently, deep learning has been successfully applied to natural language processing and significant progress has been made. This paper summarizes the recent advancement of deep learning for natural language processing and discusses its advantages and challenges. In the 1970s, the emergence of statistical methods for natural language processing led to the development of more sophisticated techniques for language modeling, text classification, and information retrieval. In the 1990s, the advent of machine learning algorithms and the availability of large corpora of text data gave rise to the development of more powerful and robust NLP systems. Natural language processing has a wide range of applications in business, from customer service to data analysis. One of the most significant applications of NLP in business is sentiment analysis, which involves analyzing social media posts, customer reviews, and other text data to determine the sentiment towards a particular product, brand, or service.

Computational linguistics, or NLP, is a science as well as an application technology. From a scientific perspective, like other computer sciences, it’s a discipline that involves the study of language from a simulated perspective. NLP isn’t directly concerned with the study of the mechanisms of human language; instead, it’s the attempt to make machines simulate human language abilities.

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The complexity of these models varies depending on what type you choose and how much information there is

available about it (i.e., co-occurring words). Statistical models generally don’t rely too heavily on background

knowledge, while machine learning ones do. Still, they’re also more time-consuming to construct and evaluate their

accuracy with new data sets. Interestingly, NLP technology can also be used for the opposite transformation, namely generating text from structured information. Generative models such as models of the GPT family could be used to automatically produce fluent reports from concise information and structured data.

What are the challenges of machine translation in NLP?

  • Quality Issues. Quality issues are perhaps the biggest problems you will encounter when using machine translation.
  • Can’t Receive Feedback or Collaboration.
  • Lack of Sensitivity To Culture.
  • Conclusion.


Organizations should be standardizing their progress note generation but in my experience this isn’t being done the majority of the time. There’s also the matter of providers documenting unstructured data in the wrong places, the use of non-standard medical abbreviations, the use of non-standard english abbreviations, and the overall documentation deficiency of providers. It has been observed recently that deep learning can enhance the performances in the first four tasks and becomes the state-of-the-art technology for the tasks (e.g. [1–8]).

Customer support


NLP is used in a wide range of industries, including finance, healthcare, education, and entertainment, to name a few. The text classification task involves assigning a category or class to an arbitrary piece of natural language input such

as documents, email messages, or tweets. Text classification has many applications, from spam filtering (e.g., spam, not

spam) to the analysis of electronic health records (classifying different medical conditions). A language is a set of words and their grammatical structure that users of one particular dialect (a.k.a., “language

variant”) use to communicate with one another and perform other functions like literature or advertising in certain

contexts. As basic as it might seem from the human perspective, language identification is

a necessary first step for every natural language processing system or function. Speakers and writers use various linguistic features, such as words, lexical meanings,

syntax (grammar), semantics (meaning), etc., to communicate their messages.

  • This way, when we analyze sentiment through emotion mining, it will lead to more accurate results.
  • We can generatereports on the fly using natural language processing tools trained in parsing and generating coherent text documents.
  • For example, words like “assignee”, “assignment”, and “assigning” all share the same word stem– “assign”.
  • Market intelligence systems can analyze current financial topics, consumer sentiments, aggregate, and analyze economic keywords and intent.
  • If you decide to develop a solution that uses NLP in healthcare, we will be here to help you.
  • Few of the problems could be solved by Inference A certain sequence of output symbols, compute the probabilities of one or more candidate states with sequences.


Developing tools that make it possible to turn collections of reports into structured datasets automatically and at scale may significantly improve the sector’s capacity for data analysis and predictive modeling. Distributional semantics (Harris, 1954; Schütze, 1992; Landauer and Dumais, 1997) is one of the paradigms that has had the most impact on modern NLP, driving its transition toward statistical and machine learning-based approaches. Distributional semantics is grounded in the idea that the meaning of a word can be defined as the set of contexts in which the word tends to occur. These vectors can be interpreted as coordinates on a high-dimensional semantic space where words with similar meanings (“cat” and “dog”) will be closer than words whose meaning is very different (“cat” and “teaspoon”, see Figure 1). This simple intuition makes it possible to represent the meaning of text in a quantitative form that can be operated upon algorithmically or used as input to predictive models.

Clinical case study


The primary goal of NLP is to enable computers to understand, interpret, and generate natural language, the way humans do. It can be used to analyze social media posts,

blogs, or other texts for the sentiment. Companies like Twitter, Apple, and Google have been using natural language

processing techniques to derive meaning from social media activity. Sentence chaining is the process of understanding how sentences are linked together in a text to form one continuous

thought. This technique uses parsing

data combined with semantic analysis to infer the relationship between text fragments that may be unrelated but follow

an identifiable pattern.

challenges in natural language processing

One potential solution to these challenges is natural language processing (NLP), which uses computer algorithms to extract structured meaning from unstructured natural language. Because NLP is a relatively new undertaking in the field of health care, the authors set out to demonstrate its feasibility for organizing and classifying these data in a way that can generate actionable information. Training state-of-the-art NLP models such as transformers through standard pre-training methods requires large amounts of both unlabeled and labeled training data. There are a number of additional open-source initiatives aimed at contributing to improving NLP technology for underresourced languages. Mozilla Common Voice is a crowd-sourcing initiative aimed at collecting a large-scale dataset of publicly available voice data21 that can support the development of robust speech technology for a wide range of languages.

Why NLP is harder than computer vision?


NLP is language-specific, but CV is not.

Different languages have different vocabulary and grammar. It is not possible to train one ML model to fit all languages. However, computer vision is much easier. Take pedestrian detection, for example.

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