Have you ever wondered how ChatGPT, Bard, Gemini, and other AI models understand exactly what you are saying? OR how tools like Grammarly correct your grammatical mistakes and provide a better alternative to your sentences. The answer to all these questions is Natural Language Processing(NLP).
Natural Languages differ from programming languages like Java, C, and C++. Natural Languages do not follow a specific syntax, although there are grammatical rules to bind the language. But except for the language professors, no one doesn't really follow them. Natural Languages are ambiguous in nature signifying that a single word can mean different things. Let's take the example of the word bark. The sound a dog makes is known as bark but the trunk or the outer covering of the tree is also known as bark. The context and reference used in the sentence are important to truly understand a word's meaning. For example, "The bark was rough and textured.", here we can clearly understand that we are talking about the tree's bark and not the dog's bark.
Before taking a deep dive into NLP and its correlation with AI models, let's first talk about how humans understand natural language.
No child learns their first language by understanding the syntax or studying the grammar rules. A child first observes his/her parents or the people in the surroundings. Tries to imitate them and after constant and continuous effort is able to speak a broken language.
The AI models follow a similar process. The AI model is fed with tons of data and is left to learn from it using specially designed and developed algorithms. These algorithms try to understand natural languages by studying the data. AI models are not taught grammatical rules and syntaxes instead, they learn from the conversations of humans in the form of data. These conversations help the AI models understand the context or the references used in the sentences.
After being trained on hundreds of GBs of data, AI is drilled enough to make conversations with humans and be able to understand human communications well enough! There is no existence of AI models like ChatGPT without their coexistence with NLP algorithms.
With time AI models will only become stronger and more accurate. The day when they completely understand human emotions and conversations is not long enough!