When was the last time you asked your Siri or Alexa to do something and they did not understand what you are saying? or they answered with something totally not related? Siri and Alexa are speech bots that rely basically on an artificial intelligence technology called NLP. If you want to find out more about NLP and what it can and can’t do continue reading this article.
NLP stands for Natural language processing which is defined as a branch of computer science and artificial intelligence concerned with assisting the computers to understand the human natural languages by analyzing huge amounts of natural language data. The NLP problems ranges from simple problems such as answering an enquiry on the web to very complex problems that requires terabytes of data for training, but How much can NLP really understand what humans says? And How long will it take until we have a normal conversation with a computer? In this article we are going to discuss 4 of the most challenging NLP problems:
1. Natural language ambiguity
In natural language, a word can have different meanings and the meaning of the word can be extracted from the context. For example, the sentence “A piece of cake” might mean that we are talking about a small portion of a birthday cake, on the other hand, it might mean that something is very easy to do. The humans don’t only use their knowledge of a language to decide the meaning of a piece of text but also consider several other factors such as desires, goals and beliefs to understand the text they are reading or listening to. For example, the sentence “I experienced a feeling I have never had before” might mean that the person experienced a very pleasant feeling or a very bad one and the meaning of this sentence depends on the personal emotions at that moment.
2. The lack of training data
One of the biggest challenges in NLP is the shortage of training data as each NLP model need to be trained on terabytes of data in order to be able to understand a specific language, model training is a complex topic which will be covered in another separate article. The lack of training data has several reasons: the first reason is that the language is a minority language which means that it is spoken by a minority of population such as Kurdish and Afrikaan. The second reason is the small amount of resources and text available on the web for example the Zulu language. Another reason for the lack of training data is missing the incentive to work on low resources languages either due to not available skills or the difficulty of the language as the case in Arabic language.
3. Spelling mistakes and entity extraction
Correcting misspelt words is an essential process in NLP as Misspellings are very frequent in human-computer interactions and it would be very hard to identify a misspelt entity (the noun in the phrase) in a text. For example: if a user wrote on a chatbot “Is it going to rain today in amestedam?”, it would be hard to identify Amsterdam as a location.
4. Semantic meanings extraction (this can be part of ambiguity)
The computer should not only understand the vocabulary of the text but it should also understand the semantic of the text. For example: in the sentence “John called his wife, and so did Sam” we don’t know if Sam called john’s wife of his own.
References
1-What are some of the challenges we face in NLP today?
2- The 4 Biggest Open Problems in NLP
3- Six challenges in NLP and NLU - and how boost.ai solves them
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the main challenges in NLP?
The four biggest open problems in NLP are: natural language understanding beyond surface patterns, handling ambiguity and context in language, achieving robust cross-lingual transfer, and building systems that can reason about common sense knowledge that humans take for granted.
Why is NLP ambiguity hard to solve?
Language ambiguity is challenging because the same words can have different meanings depending on context, cultural background, and speaker intent. Resolving ambiguity requires world knowledge, pragmatic reasoning, and understanding of conversational context that current models only partially capture.
Is NLP a solved problem?
No. While large language models have made remarkable progress on benchmarks, fundamental challenges remain in true language understanding, factual reasoning, handling low-resource languages, and robustness to adversarial inputs. NLP continues to be an active area of research.
Director of Agentic AI for the Enterprise at Writer. Building at the intersection of language, intelligence, and design.