Understanding: NLU’s secret

sauce!
Published 20 October 2020

Harpal Parmar

We often come across the term understanding in our work – which is to make
machines interpret commonly spoken natural language. Why
is understanding important in the context of natural language-handling by
machines aka Natural Language Understanding (NLU)?

To us at AUI Systems, Understanding has a specific connotation related to

meaning and context. It also represents the potential unlocking of massive
business value that currently appears beyond the reach of statistical or
Machine Learning-powered NLP systems.

Understanding is at the heart of NLU. When humans understand a sentence –

we understand the meanings of the individual words and the context in which
they are written or spoken. We draw context from personal knowledge and
experience stored in our brains. If we are confused, we look up a subject
matter reference or consult with someone possessing the relevant
experience. In short, we always reference a knowledge source to obtain
context and understanding. We naturally place the understood information in
our internal knowledge base, our brain, in the right contextual and temporal
setting – to be drawn upon at some future time.
So why is understanding in machines so important to business value? When a
machine really understands the entire content in an earnings call transcript or
a customer contact center conversation, it can extract the what, when, where,
why, and who within the transcript or customer conversation.

It is thus able to convert unstructured information into structured knowledge

that can be accessed interactively by humans using natural language
conversations. This represents a massive jump in productivity for business
analysts who earlier spent considerable time reading documents to unearth
insights. Cross referencing of knowledge across time periods is another huge
plus.

Here is a practical example: we quote an excerpt from an Apple, Inc. earnings

call transcript in 2019: “We accomplished these results despite strong
headwinds from foreign exchange which impacted our top-line growth rate by
300 basis points compared to a year ago”. To deliver value we believe NLU
must be able to understand here that overall revenue growth for the relevant
quarter was impacted negatively by 300 basis points on a year-on-year basis
due to a foreign exchange impact. This understanding is possible only when
the machine unambiguously grasps the meaning of all the words in the
sentence, the syntax, and the context of this sentence within the overall
transcript. Specifically, words such as headwinds, foreign exchange, basis
points and others and their relevance in finance must be part of the machine’s
knowledge system – hence are understood and converted to semantic
knowledge.

When this level of understanding occurs, tremendous business value is

unleashed. For example, productivity jumps when analysts can obtain
qualitative and quantitative insights from earnings calls transcripts at a
keystroke. Or when NLU powers contact center conversations to resolution
without human intervention. AUI Systems has developed an NLU engine that
delivers real understanding and is available for use.