Natural Language Processing for Industrial Applications

Abstract

Recently, natural language processing applications have become very popular in the industry. Examples of such applications include “semantic” enterprise search engines, document categorizers, speech recognizers and – last but not least – conversational agents, also known as virtual assistants or “chatbots”. The latter in particular are very sought-after in the customer care domain, where the aim is to complement the live agent experience with an artificial intelligence able to help users fulfil a task. In this paper, we discuss the challenges and limitations of industrial chatbot applications, with a particular focus on the “human-in-the-loop” aspect, whereby a cooperation between human and machine takes place in mutual interest. Furthermore, we analyse how the same aspect intervenes in other industrial natural language processing applications.