NLP is not something all data scientists necessarily work with and are required to know. Whether or not you are, depends on the company interviewing you for a data science position. You’re not interested in NLP. Well, you’ll have to know what it is so you can avoid it in your career, if nothing else.
In case you’re intrigued by NLP and willing to learn more, you will benefit from knowing what interview questions you could expect.
What is NLP?
No, it’s not that pseudoscientific psychological approach that gained popularity recently. Neuro-linguistic programming, they call it.
“Our” NLP is also getting increasingly popular, but it refers to Natural Language Processing.
As Wikipedia nicely puts it, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation.
The key word in the above definition is ‘human’. In NLP, there’s an additional keyword: computer. From it comes the definition which says NLP deals with teaching computers how to understand natural language. Since it’s a computer, this understanding means processing and analyzing natural language data stored in different data formats.
To do that, NLP combines knowledge from artificial intelligence, computer science, and linguistics.
What is NLP’s Use?
NLP is becoming a feature of our everyday lives. As I was writing the previous sentence, Google’s Smart Compose suggested the phrase ‘everyday lives’. I accepted. Because that’s what I intended to write.