Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables computers to analyze, process, and understand natural languages used by humans. This technology aims to make human-computer interaction more natural and efficient. The complexity of natural language, including semantic ambiguities and polysemy, like challenges that form core topics in NLP research important research.

History and Evolution of Natural Language Processing

The origins of NLP extend back to the early years of computer science and artificial intelligence. In 1950, Alan Turing’s paper titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" introduced the Turing Test concept, questioning whether machines could think like humans. This test aims to distinguish between human and machine responses through dialogue using natural language.

Between 1950 and 1960, NLP relied on rule-based systems. These systems attempted to interpret sentences using grammatical rules and syntactic structure analysis. In 1954, the Georgetown-IBM Experiment, conducted by IBM and Georgetown University, presented a prototype of an automatic translation system using a very limited vocabulary. This demonstration generated significant excitement about NLP’s potential at the time.

However, the late 1960s and 1970s marked the beginning of what became known as the "AI Winter," during which academic and financial support declined due to the perceived inadequacies of NLP systems and their failure to meet expectations. In the 1980s, new approaches emerged, placing greater emphasis on lexical representation, semantics, and pragmatic analysis.

Starting in the 1990s, statistical approaches to NLP gained prominence. During this period, models such as Hidden Markov Models (HMM), Naive Bayes, and decision trees became widely used. These statistical methods began offering more flexible solutions for language processing by leveraging data-driven learning capacity.

Since the 2010s, deep learning-based approaches have transformed the field of NLP. In particular, models developed by Google such as Transformer architecture and architectures based on it—including BERT and GPT—have driven significant advances in NLP applications. These models have enabled advanced systems capable of understanding contextual meaning and performing sophisticated syntactic and semantic analysis.

Today NLP is actively used across both academic and industrial domains, playing a central role in areas such as human-computer interaction, information retrieval, and text-based decision making.

Core Components of Natural Language Processing

For NLP systems to function effectively, they must perform analysis across multiple layers designed to translate the structural and semantic complexity of natural language into computable forms:

• Morphological Analysis: Words are composed of a root and attached affixes. Morphological analysis identifies the root and the specific affixes added. For example, the word "kitaplarımdan" is broken down into "kitap" (root), "lar" (plural), "ım" (possessive), and "dan" (ablative case).
• Syntactic (Grammatical) Analysis: This examines the structural relationships between words in a sentence. It involves identifying elements such as subject, predicate, and object, and determining how words are connected. This analysis is typically represented as a parse tree.
• Semantic (Meaning-based) Analysis: This extracts meaning at the word or sentence level, going beyond literal definitions to interpret context. For instance, the word "elma" can be understood as either a fruit or a technology company depending on context.
• Pragmatic and Contextual Analysis: This analyzes the context in which utterances or texts are produced—who said it, to whom, and with what intent. For example, the intent behind the sentence "Bugün hava nasıl?" is determined to be a request for information. This layer also addresses issues such as coreference resolution, identifying which entities pronouns refer to.

Each of these analyses works in tandem to help computers better understand language. In particular, deep learning approaches have enabled models to learn many of these tasks simultaneously.

Key Concepts in Natural Language Processing

• Vocabulary: The set of terms used in a text or speech.
• Corpus: Collections of texts of similar types, such as film reviews or social media posts.
• Preprocessing: Steps applied to remove unwanted text, terms, and noise from input. This is the first step in solving any NLP problem.
• Tokenization: The process of splitting a large text into smaller units called tokens. Each token is a meaningful unit of text.
• Embeddings: The process of converting each token into a vector representation before feeding it into a machine learning model. Embeddings can be created for words, word phrases, or characters.
• N-Grams: The representation of a text as sequences of n consecutive words or characters.
• Transformers: Deep learning architectures capable of parallel computation, designed to learn long-range dependencies in text.
• Parts of Speech (POS): The grammatical roles of words in a sentence, such as noun, verb, etc.
• Parts of Speech Tagging: The process of labeling words with their grammatical roles, such as noun or verb.
• Stop Words: Words that contribute little semantic value, such as conjunctions, are identified and removed.
• Normalization: The process of mapping similar terms to a canonical form.
• Lemmatization: The process of reducing a word to its base or dictionary form.
• Stemming: Aims to reduce words to their root form, similar to lemmatization, but without using POS tags to guide the process.
• Feature Extraction: The process of identifying key words or phrases relevant to the task at hand, enabling classification of specific terms or phrases.

Methods Used in Natural Language Processing

The methods used in NLP have evolved and diversified within time. These methods can be broadly categorized into four main groups:

Each method has its own advantages and limitations. Rule-based systems are transparent and controllable, while deep learning models are more comprehensive but operate as "land boxes." Hybrid systems can be constructed by combining these methods according to application needs.

Applications of Natural Language Processing

NLP technologies have moved beyond being purely academic and have become integral parts of daily life, commerce, education, and public services. Below are the primary application areas of NLP, described in detail:

1. Machine Translation (MT): One of the most well-known applications. Systems such as Google Translate, DeepL, and Microsoft Translator operate using statistical, rule-based, or neural network approaches. Modern systems use Transformer architectures to produce context-aware and more accurate translations.
2. Voice Assistants and Speech Recognition: Systems like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant detect spoken utterances, convert them to text, interpret their meaning, and generate responses. These systems integrate both speech recognition and natural language understanding modules.
3. Text Mining and Information Extraction: Enables extraction of meaningful and structured information from large text corpora such as scientific articles, news archives, or social media. For example, automated information extraction systems can be used to analyze medical literature related to a disease.
4. Sentiment Analysis: Analyzes social media comments or customer feedback to classify them as positive, negative, or neutral. This plays a critical role for companies in managing brand perception.
5. Automatic Text Summarization: Used to automatically condense long texts such as news articles, reports, or papers into concise summaries. Two types exist: extractive and abstractive. Particularly valuable for news agencies and academic journals.
6. Chatbots and Dialogue Systems: Chatbots encountered in e-commerce, banking, or public services understand user queries and provide automated responses. Advanced models can maintain context to generate more coherent dialogues.
7. Legal and Official Document Analysis: NLP techniques are applied to analyze court decisions, extract legal precedents, and classify legal documents.
8. Educational Technology: NLP-based systems enable automated feedback in language learning apps, vocabulary tracking, and reading comprehension tests.

These application areas continue to expand each year as technologies and models improve. Near In the future, more comprehensive language understanding systems are expected to enable even more law applications in fields such as psychology and creative writing, with significantly active potential.

Challenges in Natural Language Processing

Although processing natural language by computers may appear simple, the structure, meaning, and usage of language are highly complex, leading to several challenges in NLP applications:

• Semantic Ambiguity: The same word can have multiple meanings (e.g., "bank" can refer to a financial institution or the edge of a river), posing a significant challenge for language processing.
• Syntactic Ambiguity: Structural ambiguities in sentences are common. For example, in the sentence "Kadın adamı gördü," it is unclear whether the woman saw the man or the man saw the woman, depending on context.
• Discourse Context: Sentences often gain meaning only as part of a larger text or dialogue. Coreference resolution (e.g., identifying what "o" or "onlar" refer to) is essential in this context.
• Lack of Universality in Language: Each language has unique structural features. In agglutinative languages like Turkish, morphological analysis is more complex, requiring language-specific systems to be redesigned.
• Data Acquisition and Annotation: NLP systems require large volumes of diverse, annotated data to function accurately. Preparing such data is both time-consuming and costly.
• Domain-Specific Contexts: Some sentences can only be understood with specialized knowledge. For example, medical or legal texts require domain-specific expertise.

Despite these challenges, advanced modeling techniques, pre-trained language models, and enriched data culture are helping to mitigate these issues and develop more successful systems.

Popular NLP Libraries and Tools

Behind the progress in NLP are open-source libraries and developer-friendly platforms. These tools are widely used in both academic research and industrial applications:

• NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit): A Python-based library ideal for students and academics, providing an excellent environment for fundamental NLP tasks such as tokenization, stemming, and tagging.
• spaCy: A high-performance, scalable Python library focused on efficiency. It excels in named entity recognition (NER), syntactic analysis, and context-aware applications, making it recommended for industrial use.
• Stanford CoreNLP: Developed by Stanford University, this Java-based library stands out for its multilingual support and advanced semantic analysis capabilities.
• Hugging Face Transformers: A comprehensive library that simplifies the use of pre-trained models such as BERT, GPT, RoBERTa, and T5. It also provides robust infrastructure for fine-tuning and deploying models.
• OpenNLP and Flair: Alternative libraries notable for their strong multilingual support and efficient memory usage.

Thanks to these libraries, developers can rapidly build applications using pre-trained models rather than training from scratch. Particularly through transfer learning and fine-tuning techniques, significantly original applications can be achieved.

NLP Application Example

A sequence of operations applied to a simple text sample:

• Cleaning using Regular Expression (regex)
• Tokenization
• Removal of Stopwords (uninformative words)
• Lemmatization (reducing words to their base form)
• Creating a Bag of Words
• Classification using a Machine Learning model

Turkish text sample:

Code:

Output:

Original Text: Bugün hava çok güzel, güneş parlıyor ve kuşlar ötüyor. Dün ise yağmur yağdı ve hava soğuktu.

1. Cleaned Text: bugün hava çok güzel güneş parlıyor ve kuşlar ötüyor dün ise yağmur yağdı ve hava soğuktu

2. Tokens: ['bugün', 'hava', 'çok', 'güzel', 'güneş', 'parlıyor', 've', 'kuşlar', 'ötüyor', 'dün', 'ise', 'yağmur', 'yağdı', 've', 'hava', 'soğuktu']

3. After Stopword Removal: ['bugün', 'hava', 'güzel', 'güneş', 'parlıyor', 'kuşlar', 'ötüyor', 'dün', 'yağmur', 'yağdı', 'hava', 'soğuktu']

4. Lemmatized: ['bugün', 'hava', 'güzel', 'güneş', 'parlıyor', 'kuşlar', 'ötüyor', 'dün', 'yağmur', 'yağdı', 'hava', 'soğuktu']

5. Bag of Words Matrix:

 [[1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1]]

Words: ['bugün' 'dün' 'güzel' 'güneş' 'hava' 'kuşlar' 'ötüyor' 'parlıyor' 'soğuktu' 'yağdı' 'yağmur']

6. Machine Learning Model Trained.

Sample Prediction: Test Text: 'hava güzel' -> Prediction: positive