“Hey Siri, how’s the weather today?”
I’m sure, at least half of you have asked this question before (swap Siri for Alexa or Google Assistant, if you like). No doubt - voice search becomes increasingly popular. It’s convenient and fast, and automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are getting better and more accurate, the more we use it. I find it highly amazing that we can talk to machines and that they literally understand human words, while they usually only “think” in zeros and ones.
So, where does this all come from? It all has its roots in a subfield of data science called Natural Language Processing (NLP). Explained in one sentence, NLP focuses on training machines to understand human language. It’s scope of applications is huge: sentiment analysis, speech recognition, language detection, question answering and and and… If you combine and fine-tune those different NLP applications, you might end up with such a digital assistant like Siri or Alexa.
With the KNIME Textprocessing Extension you can perform all sorts of NLP techniques to your text data in a codeless fashion. To get started with text processing in KNIME or if you want to level up your game, I’d recommend this “Introduction to Text Processing” playlist on our KNIMETV on YouTube. It’s a collection of several videos related to text processing:
Introduction to Text Processing - YouTube
And if you’re more of a book guy or if you’d like to do a deep dive into text processing then the book “From Words to Wisdom” available at the KNIME Press might be of interest to you:
From Words to Wisdom - Intro to Text Mining with KNIME | KNIME
