Most companies look at it like it’s one big technology, and assume the vendors’ offerings might differ in product quality and price but ultimately be largely the same. Truth is, NLP is not one thing; it’s not one tool, but rather a toolbox.
Companies today are starting to understand that there’s a lot of value hidden in all the unstructured data they handle daily, and buried in archives whose size increased immensely over the years. We’re observing the (re)birth of an industry made of many players offering Artificial Intelligence-based solutions, organizations asking for their help in understanding the content of their documents, new important roles like the one of Data Scientist.
Being this industry very young, we’re also recording the difficulties in understanding what Natural Language processing is really about. Most companies look at it like it’s one big technology, and assume the vendors’ offerings might differ in product quality and price but ultimately be largely the same. Truth is, NLP is not one thing; it’s not one tool, but rather a toolbox. There’s great diversity when we consider the market as a whole, even though most vendors only have one tool each at their disposal, and that tool isn’t the right one for every problem. While it is understandable that a technical partner, when approached by a prospective client, will try to address a business case using the tool it has, from the client’s standpoint this isn’t ideal. Each problem demands a different solution.
