Natural Language Processing (NLP)
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What NLP is
NLP sits between linguistics and machine learning. It covers any task where software has to handle ordinary language instead of structured data: translating text, summarizing documents, filtering spam, transcribing speech or answering questions in a chat.
The hard part is that language is ambiguous. The same word can mean different things, people make typos, and meaning often depends on context.
How NLP works
Older NLP systems used hand-written rules and statistical models, each trained for one narrow task. Today most NLP runs on large language models trained on very large amounts of text. Common building blocks are:
- Tokenisation: splitting text into small units the model can process.
- Embeddings: turning words and passages into numbers that capture meaning, so similar ideas end up close together.
- Classification: assigning a label, such as a language, topic or intent.
- Generation: producing new text, such as an answer or a summary.
Example
A customer types “my parcel hasnt arrived, ordered last tuesday”. NLP lets the system cope with the typo and missing capitals, recognize that this is about a late delivery, read “last Tuesday” as a time reference and reply in the same language. Pure keyword matching could miss the point, because the word “delivery” never appears.
Why it matters for business chatbots
Without NLP, a chatbot can only react to exact keywords or button clicks. With modern NLP, visitors ask in their own words and their own language and still get a relevant answer. NLP also powers the search step behind many AI chatbots: semantic search uses embeddings to find passages that match the meaning of a question, not only its wording.
NLP in intoCHAT
intoCHAT uses an OpenAI language model, chosen and managed by intoCHAT, to understand visitors and write answers. The model detects the visitor's language and replies in it. To find the right information, intoCHAT combines semantic search with keyword search over your content, which helps with paraphrased questions as well as exact terms such as product names.