NLP here means natural language processing, a field of artificial intelligence that lets computers read, interpret and generate human language in text or speech. The abbreviation also stands for neuro-linguistic programming, which is unrelated.
What does NLP cover?
Akamai and Stanford HAI list typical tasks: tokenization (splitting text into units), parsing grammar, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, machine translation, summarization and question answering. Today’s systems rely on machine learning, in particular transformer models such as BERT and large language models such as GPT, which learn patterns from large text collections.
Applications include voice assistants, chatbots, translation, spam detection and document analysis.
What does NLP have to do with SEO?
Search engines use NLP to understand queries and pages. In 2019 Google announced BERT, a neural network technique for NLP, as part of Search. According to Google, BERT looks at the full context of a word in a sentence instead of treating words in isolation. Google’s example is the word “to” in a query about a Brazilian traveler going to the USA, where it determines the direction of travel. At launch Google said it would help Search better understand about one in ten English searches in the US, with more languages to follow. In December 2019 Google said BERT was rolling out in more than 70 languages.
Language understanding is the reason that exact repetition of a phrase matters less today than covering a topic clearly. No source checked documents a ranking effect from “NLP optimization” of text with specific tools.
Example
In a query such as “2019 brazil traveler to usa need a visa”, a model that reads the word “to” in context returns results for Brazilians traveling to the US, not the other way around. This is the example Google used when it announced BERT.
FAQ
Is NLP the same as AI? NLP is a subfield of artificial intelligence.
What does NLP stand for? Natural language processing.
Sources
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