As today's world evolve along with technology, finance leaders are expected to keep up so as not to be left behind in the market. It has been seen and proven in the past few years how important it is to be in-the-know when it comes to the latest technological development, especially if one is among the leaders of an organisation.
Among the many advancements a finance leader must wrap his or her head around are machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). These two are sometimes confused, but telling them apart helps leaders grasp their AI roles better.
ML involves self-improving algorithms that make autonomous decisions by learning from data patterns, powering applications like image recognition and facial recognition for safety and convenience.
On the other hand, NLP is a subset of AI that fine-tunes, analyses, and synthesises human language. NLP techniques transform words and phrases into coherent sentences and paragraphs, facilitating computer understanding of natural language. Voice assistants like Alexa and Siri use NLP and ML to comprehend and respond to spoken language, offering user-friendly interfaces and convenience.
While both ML and NLP fall under the AI umbrella, they diverge in their data focus. ML tackles a broad spectrum of data, encompassing images, videos, texts and numerical information. The tech tackles a multitude of tasks. In contrast, NLP concentrates on text data to decode linguistic patterns, finding its indispensable role in applications like language translation and chatbots.
While some basic NLP tasks use rule-based methods, more advanced applications integrate machine learning techniques. These include deep learning, word embeddings, and various neural networks, collectively shaping the AI landscape. These technologies empower machines to understand and generate human-like text, autonomously learn from data, and improve their performance over time.
