Glossary

Natural Language Understanding (NLU)

What is Natural Language Understanding (NLU)?

Natural language understanding is the part of language processing that captures the meaning of an utterance: what intent lies behind it, which people, places or dates are mentioned, and what is its tone? Together with natural language generation (NLG), NLU forms one of the two sides of NLP. One example is a customer service system that recognises “My parcel still hasn't arrived” as a delivery enquiry.

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The “AI router” building block in KI.ordo flows recognises the intent of an input and routes it to one of up to eight categories.

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Topics

NLP
Intent detection
Language

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Related terms

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Natural language processing is the branch of AI that enables computers to analyse, understand and generate human language in text or speech. It covers tasks such as translation, classification, summarisation, sentiment analysis and question answering. Rules and statistical methods once dominated; today the field is shaped by large language models.

NLP
Language
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Natural language generation (NLG)

Natural language generation (NLG) is the area of language processing that produces understandable text from data, bullet points or other inputs. Earlier NLG systems relied on templates and rules; today most use large language models. Typical uses include weather and stock market reports, product descriptions, summaries of key figures and chatbot answers. It is important that figures and facts from the inputs are carried over correctly and unchanged.

language processing
text generation
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Template

Semantic analysis

Semantic analysis examines the meaning of language – not just which words appear, but what is meant. This includes interpreting ambiguous words correctly in context (such as “bank” as a financial institution or a riverside), recognising relationships between concepts and classifying statements by content. It underpins applications such as analysing customer feedback, question answering or search systems that should also understand differently worded queries with the same meaning.

NLP
meaning
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