AWS Comprehend

Amazon Comprehend is a natural-language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to uncover valuable insights and connections in text.

Natural Language Processing

NLP is a field which works on ways to program computing devices to process and understand the language used by humans to communicate (referred to as natural language). It is a field that spans linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence and deals with the interactions between computers and human language.

The goal is to enable a computing device to “understand” written or spoken words, including contextual nuances (the same set of words in a sentence or an instruction may mean different things depending on the context and the language used).

NLP is an integral part of any language translation solution since a good translation needs to understand what needs to be communicated and then restructure that as a meaningful text in another language, not just replace words in a different language.

Human language is complex and has several variations and ambiguities that make it very difficult to write NLP algorithms and programs. Systems also have to be tolerant of dialects within a language and in speech analysis, of accent, speed and tone. Even with the most complex NLP algorithms, it is difficult to understand the human sentiment or intent (such as if a statement is a question or an instruction) if not worded precisely.

For example, the word “fair” has different meanings depending on what part of speech it is used as. When used as an adjective, it can describe someone who provides a balanced opinion, but it can also describe someone who has light-coloured skin. As a noun, a “fair” is an event that has games and fun activities.

Or a statement like “Give me a break” actually does not require a response or action as against someone saying “I need a break” in which case they may need a break from the task they are working on.

NLP is used along with speech recognition to deliver solutions such as virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa.

There are several applications for AWS Comprehend or NLP in general:

• Customer call center analytics Detect customer sentiment and analyze customer interactions and automatically categorize inbound support requests. Extract insights from customer surveys to improve your products.
• Index and Search product reviews Find context with search engines by indexing key phrases, entities, and sentiment, not just keywords.
• Legal briefs management Automate the extraction of insights from legal briefs such as contracts and court records. You can also secure your documents by identifying and redacting Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
• Process financial documents Classify and extract entities from financial services documents such as insurance claims or mortgage packages or find relationships between financial events in a financial article.