Get up to speed with NLP

2019 has been a landmark year for the field of natural language processing (NLP), from the rise of self-supervised learning and unstructured data to major model breakthroughs such as the Transformer models and BERT.

These techniques are now becoming much more mainstream and translating into real-world business applications. With the increasing availability of massive neural network models pre-trained on publically available unlabeled data, companies can now leverage these NLP models on their own data within their organisation.

This whitepaper explores the emerging trends and techniques in the field of NLP; the recent landmark breakthroughs in NLP architecture, in particular with regards to the Attention technique and Transformer models; and finally, the emerging business applications of NLP that these technological breakthroughs are unlocking, and that we’re likely to see implemented at a large scale across organisations in the years to come.