Natural Language Processing – a growing AI trend in manufacturing & beyond

NLP is an AI domain that specialises in emulating natural human conversation

Description
One of the quickest evolving AI technologies today is natural language processing, with a 2019 Statista report revealing that the NLP market will increase to 43.9 billion dollars by 2025. Popular use cases of NLP in manufacturing can currently be seen in:

Issue Reporting – If workers are able to use devices to communicate and report the issues and questions they have to chatbots, NLP can help them file proficient reports more quickly in an easy to interpret format. This makes workers more accountable and reduces the load for both workers and supervisors.

Web Scraping – Manufacturers can leverage NLP for better understanding of data gained with the help of a task called [web scraping](https://www.ey.com/en_us/advanced-manufacturing/how-natural-language-processing-can-build-supply-chain-resiliency). It can scan online sources for relevant industry benchmark information, as well as costs for transportation, fuel, and labor to help optimise the entire business’s operations.

Emotional Mapping – NLP is opening up a wide variety of possibilities for computers to understand the sentiments of customers and feelings of operators.

[Source dates – Mar 22 2022 & Mar 25 2020]

Relevance
Why is NLP becoming so popular year-over-year? And what might that mean for businesses? NLP can be seen as a prime example of automation technology to partially replace humans due to its ability to perform personalised conversations and take on what would be highly time consuming tasks in gathering data across formats such as customer reviews or comments. NLP can ultimately help to analyse a wider, more complex range of data and convert this into meaningful insights to make more informed decisions and better understand the an industry’s market, competitors, customers, and other important details.