Natural Language Processing (NLP): A Key to Human Advancement

Abstract 

In this paper, we will explore why NLP (Natural Language Processing) techniques contribute to Human Advancement. We will revisit how the interpretation of a text, learning from writing, and interaction with NLP based technologies affect our lives, decision, and behaviors. We will also see how NLP affects our community and social structure.

1 Introduction 

NLP technique is key to our human advancement. It is crucial now for interpreting a corpus of text. It will be critical as more sources of text are digitized. It is also the reason why we need to advocate digitization adaptation. NLP techniques are how we are going to sustain the information needs of our society. NLP is also a key technology in our learning. It is becoming a necessity for our human development as we shift our social interactions online. As we produce more text that can be analyzed, we can look into a person’s profile and information without actually revealing it. Profiling can be used to target and influence people. We should have strong guidelines for its proper application. In this paper, we explore some of the highlights on where NLP technology has brought us.

2 Interpreting Text 

One goal of NLP (Natural Language Processing) is to interpret text so that we can use the information, meaning, and intention in the text. To interpret text means to explain why words do various things through the way they are interpreted. (Umberto, 1990).

2.1 Human Approach To Interpretation of Texts 

We, as humans, interpreted text early on without using advanced NLP techniques to find meaning in the text. Early interpreters often do it for the benefit of others because decoding the written text is not accessible to everybody. A text is an open-ended universe where the interpreter can discover infinite interconnections (Umberto, 1990). The early interpreters interpret text often under the lens of philosophical thinking that gave rise to legal and social contracts. Different interpretations become foundations of ethics and belief systems. With this newfound ethics, we as humans started building social institutions that govern behavior. Now, social order is a foundation in any modern society.

2.2 Same text different meaning 

The text we interpreted is unable to capture preexisting meaning. (Umberto, 1990) That is why different interpretations lead to a different meaning of the text. Does text have a limit in its interpretation? Does text only capture a single sense? Text, when interpreted separate from the concrete circumstance of its utterance or writing, could be taken in a different context (Umberto, 1990), therefore, loosing any referential power that we think we have but is still a text that can be analyzed.

2.3 Using NLP To Interpret 

The way we interpret text now using NLP techniques is far removed from the philosophical underpinning of early interpreters of text. We interact with the text rather than deriving the text’s original intent. Using NLP techniques to interpret a text, we get entities, facts, sentiments, and different types of features. We routinely apply some of the states of the art approaches to different kinds of text to extract knowledge, meaning, and context. An example of this, we often use word embedding trained on news articles into different types of text. We use semiotics to find information in the text and often use the apparent elements of the text as significant to what the text means. We associate sentiments with the text based on the terms used in the text. But as we all know, different types of texts like literary text, news articles, social media texts often have different levels of intent and should, therefore, have different levels of interpretation. That is why most of the common NLP techniques do not necessarily apply to most bodies of text we analyze.

2.4 No more misinterpretation 

Since we apply common NLP techniques to understand unstructured text. Does it mean that our analysis is more objective by using NLP techniques and not tainted by human bias? Human interpretation often “beats the text into a shape which will serve his own purpose” (Rorty, 1982). Are we able to identify the truth of what the text implied obscurely and understand what is just beneath the surface of the text? Our NLP techniques are based on mathematics, logic, science, and computer programming, which are still dominated by human rationalism. The words that we use today may not mean the same things when used in the future. The attempt to look for a final, unattainable meaning leads to the acceptance of a never-ending drift or sliding of meaning.(Umberto, 1990) Beware of misinterpretation.

2.5 NLP Interpretation 

As we analyze more and more text, we should be careful of any misinterpretation because We also have more text to interpret, which can be prone to errors. Using NLP techniques to interpret text may not be easily accessible to everybody. We might discover new meanings for the same old body of text. Our interpretation might be the beginning of a new social construct that might guide new social behavior in the future. Our social behavior is seeing a text-based shift as we interact a lot more using social media. We can not help but extend our NLP techniques for analysis to this form of text. From this, we can instantly identify behaviors and tendencies almost immediately.

3 Digitization of Text 

When we analyze text now, we always get it in digitized form. Even if we have the original text in printed, audio, or graphic form, advances in computer technology can easily transform it into its digitized version. We have greater access to any form of text and more advanced tools to interpret those texts. This same ease of using digitized text makes it easier for that text to be distant to its original context. The digitized text gave us a stable object on which we can perform our interpretation countless of times. A text could now be operated upon as a stable physical object felt as somehow distinct from the living, moving thought, and speech performing the hermeneutic operation. Hermeneutics refers to the resulting systematized interpretation of text.(Ong, 1995) The digitization of text allowed us to perform complex ways of interpreting text like word embeddings. The digitized text also transformed us to an information society and information of itself says nothing unless it is interpreted.(Ong, 1995)

3.1 Breakdown of digitized text 

As we all know, computers work by turning any information to 1 and a 0 in order to operate on it. The original text is taken further away from its original context and form. This break down is necessary in order to perform interpretation using advanced computing power but also is highly prone to identify words with the text and only the text unless we supplement it with additional information.

3.2 Human digitization 

Digitization means the treatment of data in terms of numerically distinct units. A digit today commonly means a numerical unit such as digitization employs—in computer programs 0 and 1.(Ong, 1995) Computers are human tools that are extensions of us. They are artificial but we continually put a little bit of ourselves in it. All the information stored away in the digitized form is concrete representations of human thought that we can analyze over and over again. We need to keep capturing text because eventually, it will give use of unresolved contradictions and stale information, and, outdated word embeddings. We can not totally put ourselves in something as artificial as the computer but we have something good enough in the data, text, and images that big social media companies capture. The data captured helps us discover human tendencies by analyzing text using NLP techniques in the context of social media postings and the immediate community. Could we also influence human tendencies this way?

3.3 Digitization Sustainability 

If we are going to sustain our society that is deeply rooted in information nowadays, we must keep capturing a lot of digitized information like text, utterances from videos, discourses, speeches in order to supply new and relevant answers. Whatever happened to the idea of digitizing all books? (Jennifer, 2017) Digitization also makes all that information easily accessible to anyone in the world. Imagine having access to a rare book’s text to analyze? That would be impossible for virtually everybody without digitization. Imagine if newspapers did not adopt digitization? You would not be evaluating some of your NLP tasks using the WSJ corpus.(Paul and Baker, 1992) NLP practitioners should advocate for digitization because it would give us new sources of insights and help support the advancement of NLP techniques. Advances in NLP techniques would bring about more accurate information that our information society would consume. Accurate information leads to better decisions and outcomes.

4 NLP in Learning 

Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches help students in better understanding educational material and curriculum.(Alhawiti, 2014) NLP techniques are almost universal that the methods can be applied to different languages now. NLP techniques help us consume information regardless of language. The language barrier is being chipped away little by little in social and education settings by NLP techniques. With this, NLP will give us unprecedented access to information in a lot of areas like science, education and learning, books in other languages. Understanding new content will give us new perspectives and insights to us, as humans. The transfer of knowledge will abound and the context of our learning becomes universal.

4.1 Social Learning and NLP 

One of our adaptations as humans is a relatively long childhood. (Remmel, 2008) We need a lot of time to develop our complex brains. Some of the areas that drive this long childhood are social intelligence and language. Language, in particular, is learned by being a child a lot faster because of the limited information processing capacity that forces a child to focus on constituent components of language and build from there. (Remmel, 2008) With this extended childhood, we learn about social relations and competence. Social complexity is a required ingredient in human cognitive evolution. (Remmel, 2008) Our learning is highly correlated with our social interactions. Our social interactions are dominated by language.

4.2 Social Learning through Social Media 

The context of our social interactions is now shifting to an online setting. Our communications are readily captured text where we can perform advanced NLP techniques. We can use NLP techniques to analyze our social interactions online quickly. Pair NLP techniques with advanced AI (Artificial Intelligence) techniques, then artificial interactions that teach and influence behavior is possible. We can significantly improve communications, shape culture, and help accelerate learning through NLP based on our online interactions.

4.3 Platform of Influence 

A lot of information flow through social media. Members of these social networks compete for attention and influence. (Romero et al., 2011) A lot of companies that are on these platforms develop social media strategies to reach target audiences. (Hanna et al., 2011). One of the most effective strategies that NLP offers is to extract valuable intelligence and tracking sentiment from Social Media. Sentiment analysis involves discerning subjective material and extracting various forms of attitudinal information: sentiment, opinion, mood, and emotion.(Sattikar and Kulkarni, 2012). Sentiment analysis helps us understand conversations and determine appropriate actions to influence either an individual or a community. Most of those individuals are young people. Social Media is where most of our young people are. Using Social Media is among the most common activity of today’s children and adolescents. Engaging in various forms of Social Media is a routine activity that research has shown to benefit children and adolescents by enhancing communication, social connection, and even technical skills. (O’Keeffe and Clarke-Pearson, 2011) Social media will play a big part in the social and emotional development of young people. Employing NLP techniques in social media is a critical technology that can bring advancement to our future generations if we so choose to use it carefully.

5 Quantitative Analysis, Revealing You 

One of the interesting parts in NLP is Quantitative Text Analysis. Quantitative text analysis is a set of techniques stemming from the social sciences where either a human judge or a computer extracts semantic or grammatical relationships between words in order to find out the meaning or stylistic patterns of a casual personal text for the purpose of psychological profiling etc.(Sattikar and Kulkarni, 2012) There has been a lot of research into profiling authors personality and demographic traits as well. Revealing information about the author of the text just by analyzing the text is a task that is of growing importance for national security, criminal investigations, and market research.(Litvinova et al., 2016) As we communicate more online, the need to identify authorship is a growing need as well because we can assume an online identity through the use of assumed names making it hard to trust online communications. Applying quantitative analysis to our everyday communication online is now becoming commonplace on most social media platforms. They can use it to target us with advertising, recommendations, and influence us to adapt to certain buying behaviors.

6 Discussion 

When we, as humans, interpreted text without using advance NLP techniques to find the meaning in the text, to using advanced analysis of our daily communications to profile conjecture information, indeed, NLP has come a long way to shape us. Our early interpretations of text formed the basis of our modern social contracts and laws. NLP techniques that get a sense of who you are like quantitatively analyzing your text in social media imply that NLP has a certain level of influence in our daily lives. We are a society that is hungry for information all because of NLP. 

Digitization of text makes NLP much more critical now. Without NLP techniques, how can we possibly extract all that information from digitized text. We need to sustain our societies’ hunger for information coming from a different context and different languages. Using NLP techniques on a lot of digital text helps us in understanding and learning materials quicker. 

Social media platforms that have most of our young people’s attention captured are being analyzed and influenced by using NLP techniques applied in those platforms. They might even begin aiding their cognitive and emotional development. 

As more advanced techniques like quantitative analysis that can reveal information about us just by analyzing the text we have written, NLP is becoming a cornerstone in influencing and behavior targeting. If we can influence people on a scale that we have in social media platforms, then NLP techniques will be a crucial technology on how we shape our future society. NLP will be an essential technology either to our advancement or decline.

7 Conclusion 

We should be careful and ethical on how we leverage NLP techniques. We can be impacting communities, demographics, and segments of people, mainly if used on a social media platform. Young people on social media are especially vulnerable with targeting strategies by using NLP techniques on their social media posting. 

Interpreting and analyzing text should be done without our bias. We, as humans, are naturally biased. The text that we produce is an extension of our prejudices. NLP techniques that use bias data would be biased. We should be aware of this when applying NLP techniques. 

There will be more digitized text in the future. We should rally behind efforts in digitizing text sources, for it will benefit us, and we need this to discover new insights and knowledge. NLP expertise will be in demand if there are more digitized text sources for us to explore. 

Use the quantitative analysis for author profiling with care because it might not paint a whole picture. 

There is more to NLP than just looking at text. It is one of the critical technologies that will work in our advancement, if we use it carefully. All of the following are possible because of where we are right now. Carry out conversations with computers, win in Jeopardy, understand a different language that we don’t speak or write, deduct logic from a series of sentences, influence young consumers, know your sentiment, and reveal you, using a piece of text that you produced.

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