NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND ITS EFFECTS ON SOCIETY AS A WHOLE: A SURVEY

Abstract

Over the past 25 years, computational linguistics has grown to become both an interesting area of scientific research and upcoming technology that is increasingly being put into consumer products (for example, applications such as Apple’s Siri, Microsoft Cortana or Skype). There are main four key factors that are the driving force behind these developments: (i) an immense increase in computing power, (ii) the availability of huge amounts of linguistic data, (iii) the development of highly effective machine learning (ML) methods, and (iv)a more enriched understanding of the structure of human language and its application in social contexts.[2] Natural language processing (NLP) is the branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that deals with communication: How can a computer be programmed to understand, process, and generate language just like a human being? With the increasing use of the Web and other text application areas, there has been an increasing demand in both text mining and natural language processing (NLP). The main goal of Natural Language Processing (NLP) is to implement within computers the skill set required to understand a normal human language or natural language. It is related to the field of HCI ie. Human-Computer Interaction. One of the motivations of NLP is for the society whose access to web information is blocked simply by their inability to use the keyboard and OS. Natural language comes under the purview of AI with the goal of understanding and recreating meaningful expressions in human language. AI is the ability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior. This paper presents a survey on Natural language processing (NLP) and its effects on society as a whole. Here I talk about sentiment analysis which has a long-term effect on society. I also talk about social media mining which results in a huge amount of structured social information which is extremely important in the predictive analytics industry also. Then I discuss the future scope of NLP in the society.