20 Natural Language Processing Examples For Businesses

By wonderflow 15/08/2019

If this is the first time you’re hearing about Natural Language Processing (also known as NLP), this
basically deals with using machine learning to derive meaning from human languages.
Now, this might seem like pretty innovative, cutting edge technology, but the truth is that NLP is
something that’s been part of our lives for years now. In fact, consumers from across the globe
interact with NLP on a daily basis, without even realizing it.
Want to learn more about NLP, and its many uses? In this blog post, we share 20 natural language
processing examples across a wide range of industries.
PS: We’ve previously published a post on natural language processing examples as well, but this is a
new and improved (and more substantial!) version of that previous post. Read on to find out more!
What Is Natural Language Processing?
To expand on our earlier definition, NLP is a branch of artificial intelligence that helps computers
understand, interpret and manipulate human language. To learn more about NLP, watch this video.
Now that you’ve got a better understanding of NLP, check out these 20 natural language processing
examples that showcase how versatile NLP is.
1. Social media monitoring
Top on our list of natural language processing examples is none other than… social media
monitoring!
If you’ve ever used a social media monitoring tool such as Hootsuite or Buffer, these are basically
built using NLP technology. These tools help you to monitor social media channels for mentions of
your brand, and alert you when consumers are talking about your brand.
As many marketers and business owners will know, having a negative review go viral on social media
can destroy a brand’s reputation overnight. Bearing this in mind, it’s important for companies to
engage in social media monitoring or listening, and make sure that they address any potential crises
immediately.
2. Sentiment analysis
Next on our list of natural language processing examples is sentiment analysis, which is basically a
smaller subset of social media monitoring.
While the latter refers to monitoring the social media landscape and listening in on conversations as
a whole, the former deals specifically with identifying opinions and determining whether the author
of the post holds a positive, negative, or neutral opinion towards a brand.
Again, NLP comes into the picture here. Basically, using NLP, sentiment analysis tools pick out
emotionally-charged words that are used to describe a brand and/or a customer’s experience with a
brand.
For instance, if a post contains plenty of positive language such as “amazing”, “fantastic”,
“wonderful”, then the tool might conclude that the overall sentiment is positive.
With sentiment analysis, companies can gauge how receptive their customers are to a particular
product or service, or even to a recent change that they’ve implemented (eg a chance in their
returns policy, support policy, etc).
3. Text analysis
Text analysis can be broken into several sub-categories, including morphological, grammatical,
syntactic and semantic analyses.
By analysing text and extracting different types of key elements (such as topics, people, dates,
locations, companies), companies can better organize their data, and from there, identify useful
patterns and insights.
For instance, eCommerce companies can conduct text analysis of their product reviews in order to
find out what customers like or dislike about their products, and how customers are using their
products. To do this, these companies can use NLP-equipped tools such as Wonderflow’s
Wonderboard.
4. Survey analytics
Apart from analysing their product reviews, companies can also analyse their survey results in order
to come up with actionable insights. Again, NLP helps these companies to make sense of all their raw
data, and generate useful insights and takeaways.
Of course, companies who are conducting small-scale surveys might choose to manually analyse
their data and come up with recommendations.
That said, if you’re surveying your entire database of 10,000 customers, then it isn’t feasible to sit
down and sift through all the results yourself. Here, automating the process using an NLP-equipped
tool makes more sense.

See how the world’s most customer-centric brands are using Wonderflow on our Use Case page.

5. Spam filters
Think spam isn’t a huge problem? Think again. According to statistics, spam accounts for 45% of all
emails sent, and about 14.5 billion spam emails are sent every single day.
Now, looking at the above statistics, you might be wondering why you don’t get more spam. Well,
that’s because we’ve got excellent spam filters that flag dodgy emails as spam, and prevent them
from reaching our primary inboxes.
How do these spam filters work? Among other factors (deliverability, email domains, etc), these
filters use NLP technology to analyse email subject lines and their body content.
From here, it’s fairly easy for them to ascertain what’s spam and what’s not — emails that contain
plenty of capitalized text and words such as “free”, “promotion”, “buy now”, etc, have a high chance
of being spam.
6. Email classification
Running in the same vein, there’s also email classification, which you’ll be familiar with if you’re a
Gmail user.
Basically, when you look at your Gmail inbox, you’ll see that your emails are categorized in three
tabs — Primary, Social, and Promotions. All your personal emails go into Primary, your notifications
from social media platforms go into Social, and newsletters from companies that you sign up to hear
from land in Promotions.
Here, Gmail uses NLP to identify and evaluate the content within each email, so that it can
categorize them accurately. The system isn’t 100% foolproof, though, which is why you might find
some newsletters (especially ones that contain more text than images) getting filtered to your
Primary tab.
7. Autocomplete
With autocomplete, Google predicts what you’re interested in searching for based on the initial few
characters or words that you enter.
To suggest relevant keywords for you, Google relies on a treasure trove of data that catalogs what
other consumers are looking to find when entering specific search terms. To make sense of that data
and understand the subtleties between different search terms, the company uses NLP.
8. Autocorrect
If you often text on the go, or you have fat thumbs that make it hard for you to hit the right keys on
your keyboard, you’ll appreciate the beauty of autocorrect.
Like autocomplete, autocorrect relies on NLP technology. Here, NLP identifies the closest possible
term to your misspelling, and automatically changes your misspelled term to the accurate one
instead.
9. Spell check
Autocomplete and autocorrect aside, there’s also spell check, which both students and working
professionals rely heavily on.
Imagining having to submit an important essay without being able to look through your work, or
sending an email to the CEO of your company, without spell check.
Sure, you could look through your text manually, but there’s no denying that spell check is more
effective at flagging out misspellings or grammatical errors.
Spell check aside, other writing tools such as Grammarly, ProWritingAid and WhiteSmoke also utilize
NLP to correct users’ spelling and grammatical mistakes.