Natural language understanding
What is Natural Language Understanding (NLU)?
Natural language understanding (NLU) is a part of artificial intelligence that allows machines to comprehend the true meaning behind human language.
While natural language processing (NLP) focuses on understanding and using human language data overall, NLU is all about interpreting the intent and context as best as possible.
What can NLU do?
NLU allows conversational AI and chatbots to:
Identify goals: Understand what a person wants from their messages (like booking a flight or checking the weather)
Extract key information: Recognize and pull out important details like names, dates, locations mentioned
Understand tone: Detect what feelings one puts behind the words (angry, happy, sarcastic, etc.)
Consider context: Factor in the full conversation history to interpret meaning correctly
What is the difference between NLP and NLU?
NLP processes language data. NLU understands the meaning behind that data. NLP handles all language inputs and outputs. NLU interprets the true intent and context accurately.
In other words, NLP operates on language data, while NLU understands what that data means.