• July 5, 2025

NLP vs NLU vs NLG Know what you are trying to achieve NLP engine Part-1 by Chethan Kumar GN

IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding

nlp nlu

Whether it’s simple chatbots or sophisticated AI assistants, NLP is an integral part of the conversational app building process. And the difference between NLP and NLU is important to remember when building a conversational app because it impacts how well the app interprets what was said and meant by users. Together with NLG, they will be able to easily help in dealing and interacting with human customers and carry out various other natural language-related operations in companies and businesses. As we summarize everything written under this NLU vs. NLP article, it can be concluded that both terms, NLP and NLU, are interconnected and extremely important for enhancing natural language in artificial intelligence. Machines programmed with NGL help in generating new texts in addition to the already processed natural language. They are so advanced and innovative that they appear as if a real human being has written them.

nlp nlu

The tech builds upon the foundational elements of NLP but delves deeper into semantic and contextual language comprehension. One of the primary goals of NLU is to teach machines how to interpret and understand language inputted by humans. It aims to teach computers what a body of text or spoken speech means. NLU leverages AI algorithms to recognize attributes of language such as sentiment, semantics, context, and intent. It enables computers to understand the subtleties and variations of language. For example, the questions “what’s the weather like outside?” and “how’s the weather?” are both asking the same thing.

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In NLU, the texts and speech don’t need to be the same, as NLU can easily understand and confirm the meaning and motive behind each data point and correct them if there is an error. Natural language, also known as ordinary language, refers to any type of language developed by humans over time through constant repetitions and usages without any involvement of conscious strategies. In the world of AI, for a machine to be considered intelligent, it must pass the Turing Test.

With more progress in technology made in recent years, there has also emerged a new branch of artificial intelligence, other than NLP and NLU. It is another subfield of NLP called NLG, or Natural Language Generation, which has received a lot of prominence and recognition in recent times. This book is for managers, programmers, directors – and anyone else who wants to learn machine learning. To pass the test, a human evaluator will interact with a machine and another human at the same time, each in a different room. If the evaluator is not able to reliably tell the difference between the response generated by the machine and the other human, then the machine passes the test and is considered to be exhibiting “intelligent” behavior.

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NLG identifies the essence of the document, and based on those analytics, it generates highly accurate answers. Humans have the natural capability of understanding a phrase and its context. However, with machines, understanding the real meaning behind the provided input isn’t easy to crack.

nlp nlu

NLP-driven intelligent chatbots can, therefore, improve the customer experience significantly. Customers all around the world want to engage with brands in a bi-directional communication where they not only receive information but can also convey their wishes and requirements. Given its contextual reliance, an intelligent chatbot can imitate that level of understanding and analysis well. Within semi-restricted contexts, it can assess the user’s objective and accomplish the required tasks in the form of a self-service interaction. Such a chatbot builds a persona of customer support with immediate responses, zero downtime, round the clock and consistent execution, and multilingual responses.

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NLU is nothing but an understanding of the text given and classifying it into proper intents. Natural Language Generation(NLG) is a sub-component of Natural language processing that helps in generating the output in a natural language based on the input provided by the user. This component responds to the user in the same language in which the input was provided say the user asks something in English then the system will return the output in English. Both technologies are widely used across different industries and continue expanding. Already applied in healthcare, education, marketing, advertising, software development, and finance, they actively permeate the human resources field. For example, for HR specialists seeking to hire Node.js developers, the tech can help optimize the search process to narrow down the choice to candidates with appropriate skills and programming language knowledge.

nlp nlu

You can add a product entity, and then use it to extract information from the user input about the product that the customer is interested in. Natural language understanding (NLU) is a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that uses computer software to understand input in the form of sentences using text or speech. NLU enables human-computer interaction by analyzing language versus just words. On our quest to make more robust autonomous machines, it is imperative that we are able to not only process the input in the form of natural language, but also understand the meaning and context—that’s the value of NLU.

Step 5: Parse Unstructured Data

But before any of this natural language processing can happen, the text needs to be standardized. It can identify spelling and grammatical errors and interpret the intended message despite the mistakes. This can have a profound impact on a chatbot’s ability to carry on a successful conversation with a user. The input can be any non-linguistic representation of information and the output can be any text embodied as a part of a document, report, explanation, or any other help message within a speech stream. The knowledge source that goes to the NLG can be any communicative database.

  • 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.
  • If a developer wants to build a simple chatbot that produces a series of programmed responses, they could use NLP along with a few machine learning techniques.
  • To pass the test, a human evaluator will interact with a machine and another human at the same time, each in a different room.
  • It involves the development of algorithms and techniques to enable computers to comprehend, analyze, and generate textual or speech input in a meaningful and useful way.

This offers a great opportunity for companies to capture strategic information such as preferences, opinions, buying habits, or sentiments. Companies can utilize this information to identify trends, detect operational risks, and derive actionable insights. Evolving from basic menu/button architecture and then keyword recognition, chatbots have now entered the domain of contextual conversation.

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