Introduction
If you’ve been waiting for Natural Language Processing to capture your imagination with exciting use cases, your wait may be over. A tectonic shift in society and artificial intelligence technology has begun. Bots powered by NLP have begun to direct the evolution of societies, countries, and even entire continents. The AI explosion that futurists have been anticipating is upon us, and this explosion is powered by Natural Language Processing technology in the hands of people like you.
Ever since computers were invented, engineers have dreamed of machines that could understand and communicate with us by using natural language text. Computer scientists, linguists, and machine learning engineers made steady progress toward that goal. Recently, that incremental progress hit an inflection point and produced a rapid succession of leaps in the accuracy and breadth of Natural Language Processing power. Search engines have made us all experts in virtually everything. Virtual assistants (chatbots) for customer service, scheduling, recruiting, navigation, and even therapy make it possible to automate much of our lives and influence one another without lifting a finger. We have more and more time for high-level thinking and exploration. And we’ve come full circle with bots composing tweets, Facebook posts, advertisements, and even entire news reports and movie scripts that are being indexed by search engines to satisfy our voracious appetite for information. It’s likely that you found this book by using a search engine, and it’s more than likely that some of the sentences you’ll read in it were composed by machines.
We hope that these three chapters, from Deep Learning for Language Processing and Natural Language Processing in Action, will surprise and inspire you with your own ideas for applying NLP to your personal and professional life. More important, we hope that the prosocial sentiment of these chapters will become part of your thinking. We hope that you will be inspired by our emphasis on virtual assistants that truly assist rather than manipulate. The AI explosion will end much better for us all if you use your newfound society-influencing NLP powers for good rather than evil.
-- Hobson Lane
Co-author of Natural Language Processing in Action