NLP (Natural Language Processing) takes center stage in the fight against COVID

The world is fighting one of the greatest battles of humanity – the COVID 19 virus. Doctors, scientists, healthcare workers, and many other frontline workers are putting their hearts and souls into finding a solution to end this global pandemic – which has affected millions of lives and livelihood across the world.

As the world comes together to combat this pandemic, technology is at the forefront and center of this fight, assisting governments, healthcare organizations, businesses and citizens emerge strong. While supercomputers are assisting scientists in understanding and accelerating research, people around the world are using digital technologies to work from home, order groceries and other vital supplies online and more.

As a global, interconnected society, we’re being reminded daily of the countless ways these modern technologies can be put to great use for all.

Making AI understand the language

Artificial Intelligence is one-way businesses, governments, healthcare institutions are now digitally engaging with their employees, citizens and customers during this difficult time. In order to do that, AI must understand human language. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the subset of AI that enables computer systems to learn to analyze and understand human language with accuracy.

NLP empowers data scientists to build human language into AI models to better understand human behaviour and the reasons behind decisions and actions, spot anomalies, and better predict and prevent negative outcomes. With such insights in hand, organizations can improve everything from customer care and transportation, to finance and education.

NLP in the fight against COVID

Today, NLP powered chat programs are helping detect the outbreak in the initial stages by helping people track their symptoms and also driving monitoring efforts in order to limit the virus spread. The Government of Andhra Pradesh, introduced a virtual agent ( that can respond in English, Hindi and Telugu) that provides COVID_19 related information for citizens on the various response efforts and measures taken by the Government.

While on the other hand - Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has introduced a virtual assistant on its portal for its frontline staff/data entry operators –   to answer their queries related to the nature and process of data to be captured by test labs, how to record inventory of test kits and reagents, the process of reporting to various Government agencies and references to the latest guidance.

In crisis, people need quick, reliable answers, without any busy signals or long delays – these virtual agents- can understand a question and provide relevant, accurate responses thereby freeing humans to focus on more critical work at hand. Whether it is connecting with citizens, customers or with employees, many organizations leveraged virtual agents as a reliable tool to engage and address concerns and queries.

NLP in a post-COVID workplace – virtual assistant and more

Virtual agents can be quickly programmed and deployed, they can also respond to queries round the clock and constantly learn from every interaction. In the post-COVID workplace, they can be leveraged to engage with customers, employees, partners virtually. 97 per cent executives say their organization will deploy more AI tools in the next two years than they had prior to COVID-19.

As AI becomes more pervasive in business and government operations – in the form of chatbots, virtual agents or other automated processes – it needs to understand sentiment, dialects, intonations and more. To enable AI understand the language of business, Researchers are constantly at work to advance NLP capabilities, some more recent ones include:

• Sentiment Analysis  - Identify and understand complicated word schemes or idioms, frequently used in casual language

• Summarization – Ability to analyze textual data and provide a summary on a topic

• Clustering – Enabling users to cluster incoming data to create meaningful topics of related information automatically, which can then be analyzed.

Businesses possess a vast amount of human language data, which includes chatbot conversations, voice transcriptions or industry-specific business contracts. For AI to make sense of this data, it needs access to this data – which might be in silos, on different platforms or Cloud.

By Gargi Dasgupta, Director of IBM Research India and CTO, IBM India/South Asia

With advancements in NLP and data integration capabilities that some NLPs offer, data scientists can apply pre-determined algorithms and rules to extract key pieces of information or insights almost instantly- irrespective of where the data resides – private, public, hybrid or multi-cloud environment. This lets companies handle their content and workflows in a more effective manner.

With such insights in hand, organizations can improve everything from customer care and transportation to finance and education.

To ensure technology advances at a rapid pace and is in sync with business demands, more intuitive AI systems are needed that not only understand the natural language but can also explain their decisions, are less labour intensive to deploy and maintain.

Advancing, scaling and trusting AI is all about overcoming these challenges so that AI can learn from small amounts of data, leverage techniques that combine neural and symbolic processing is able to explain how it reached a decision and continuously learns and adapts.

With these capabilities, AI will be more relatable and mainstream for everyday tasks, assisting attorneys with trial preparations or to better understand energy usage and maintenance demands of machines.

AI promises to augment human intelligence and efforts by providing insights from the troves of data generated daily and enabling humans to make better-informed decisions.