philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

The Power of Natural Language Processing

...

What NLP Can Do

The best known natural language processing tool is GPT-3, from OpenAI, which uses AI and statistics to predict the next word in a sentence based on the preceding words. NLP practitioners call tools like this “language models,” and they can be used for simple analytics tasks, such as classifying documents and analyzing the sentiment in blocks of text, as well as more advanced tasks, such as answering questions and summarizing reports.  ...

The latest version, called InstructGPT, has been fine-tuned by humans to generate responses that are much better aligned with human values and user intentions, and Google’s latest model shows further impressive breakthroughs on language and reasoning. ...

For businesses, the three areas where GPT-3 has appeared most promising are writing, coding, and discipline-specific reasoning. ...

A Language-Based AI Research Assistant

In my own work, I’ve been looking at how GPT-3-based tools can assist researchers in the research process. I am currently working with Ought, a San Francisco company developing an open-ended reasoning tool (called Elicit) that is intended to help researchers answer questions in minutes or hours instead of weeks or months. Elicit is designed for a growing number of specific tasks relevant to research, like summarization, data labeling, rephrasing, brainstorming, and literature reviews. ...

How Can Organizations Prepare for the Future?

Identify your text data assets and determine how the latest techniques can be leveraged to add value for your firm.

You are certainly aware of the value of data, but you still may be overlooking some essential data assets if you are not utilizing text analytics and NLP throughout your organization. ...

Aggressively adopt new language-based AI technologies; some will work well and others will not, but your employees will be quicker to adjust when you move on to the next. And don’t forget to adopt these technologies yourself — this is the best way for you to start to understand their future roles in your organization.

See the full story here: https://hbr.org/2022/04/the-power-of-natural-language-processing?ab=hero-subleft-1