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6 Best NLP Tools: AI Tools For Content Excellence - EWeek
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Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables computers to interpret and understand human language. Using machine learning (ML) and AI, NLP tools analyze text or speech to identify context, meaning, and patterns, allowing computers to process language like humans do.
One key benefit of NLP is that it enables users to engage with computer systems through regular, conversational language, meaning no advanced computing or coding knowledge is needed. It's the foundation of generative AI systems like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Claude, powering their ability to sift through vast amounts of data to extract valuable insights.
I evaluated six top-rated NLP software to see how they compared on features, pros and cons, and pricing.
Featured Partners: AI Software Top natural language processing tools comparisonNLP tools enable computers to understand and interpret human language. The table below compares the best NLP tools based on key criteria, including starting price and use case.
Best for Supported languages Open source License Free plan Grammarly Content creation Multiple (JavaScript, Python, etc.) No Proprietary Yes IBM Watson Comprehensive enterprise text analysis Multiple (Python, JavaScript, C++, etc.) No Proprietary Free for 30,000 NLU items per month Google Cloud Natural Language API Best for scalable text insights Multiple (PHP, Node.Js, Python, etc.) No Proprietary $300 in free credits for new customers spaCy Fast, production-ready text processing Python Yes MIT Yes Hugging Face Transformers Pre-trained models and customizations Python, JavaScript (via API) Yes Apache 2.0 Yes Natural Language Toolkit Educators and researchers Python Yes Apache 2.0 YesOverall, I picked Grammarly as the top NLP tool, ranking first for integrations and tying for cost.
Continue reading to learn more about each platform's use case, pricing, and key features, or skip ahead to see my scoring logic.
GrammarlyBest for AI-powered content creation
Overall rating: 4.2/5Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant that helps you improve your written communication across various platforms. It analyzes texts in real time and identifies potential issues in grammar, spelling, punctuation, and more. It also allows you to generate outlines, draft short stories, and enhance existing texts in various writing contexts.
Grammarly stands out for its intuitive interface and sophisticated writing and editing tool that evaluates overall document quality. You can customize style preferences and voice settings and receive tailored recommendations based on your goals. It also has a built-in plagiarism checker and AI detector, adding another layer of content verification all in one place.
Grammarly's features and accessibility are remarkable, catering to a wide range of users and supporting various use cases, from academic writing to professional communication. Its cross-platform functionality ensures writers receive instant feedback and recommendations.
Grammarly's AI content creator also offers advanced generative AI capabilities, making it an ideal choice for producing high-quality text for blog posts, social media, documents, email campaigns, and more.
Pros and cons Pros Cons Real-time grammar and style checking Limited free plan features Seamless integration with various content platforms Occasionally flags stylistic preferences as errors Advanced insights into tone and readability Limited offline functionality PricingBest for comprehensive enterprise text analysis
Overall rating: 4/5IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a cloud-based platform that uses IBM's proprietary artificial intelligence engine to analyze and interpret textual data. It can extract critical information from unstructured text, such as entities, keywords, sentiment, and categories, and identify relationships between concepts for deeper context.
IBM Watson NLU is popular with large enterprises and research institutions and can be used in various applications, from social media monitoring and customer feedback analysis to content categorization and market research. It's well-suited for organizations that perform advanced text analyses to enhance decision-making and gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior, market trends, and other essential data insights. Plagiarism checker and AI detector, adding another layer of content verification all in one place.
IBM Watson NLU impresses with its advanced text analytics capabilities. Its numerous customization options and integration with IBM's cloud services make it a powerful and robust solution for businesses in industries like customer service, healthcare, finance, and human resources.
Pros and Cons Pros Cons Simple and easy to use Documentation could be better Recognizes semantic roles Sentiment analysis accuracy could be improved Customizable models High-volume use can be costly PricingNLU items are units of text up to 10,000 characters analyzed for a single feature; total cost depends on the number of text units and features analyzed.
Key featuresBest for scalable text insights
Overall rating: 3.8/5Google Cloud Natural Language API is a service provided by Google that helps developers generate insights from unstructured text using machine learning algorithms. The API can analyze text for sentiment, entities, and syntax and separate them into different categories. It also offers entity recognition, sentiment analysis, content classification, and syntax analysis tools.
Google Cloud Natural Language API is widely used by organizations leveraging Google's cloud infrastructure for seamless integration with other Google services. It allows users to build custom ML models using AutoML Natural Language, a tool designed to create high-quality models without requiring extensive knowledge in machine learning, using Google's NLP technology., and other essential data insights. Plagiarism checker and AI detector, adding another layer of content verification all in one place.
I chose Google Cloud Natural Language API for its efficiency in extracting insights from large volumes of textual data. Its integration with Google Cloud services and support for custom machine learning models make it suitable for businesses performing complex, multilingual text analysis, although costs can add up quickly for high-volume tasks.
Pros and cons Pros Cons Multilingual support Initial learning curve Can classify documents in more than 700 predefined categories Can be expensive for organizations with lots of data Integrates with other Google Cloud services Limited customization for specific domain requirements without using AutoML PricingSee Google Natural Cloud pricing chart for more information.
Key featuresBest for fast, production-ready text processing
Overall rating: 3.8/5spaCy stands out for its speed and efficiency in text processing, making it an efficient tool for large-scale NLP tasks. Its pre-trained models can perform various NLP tasks out of the box, including tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, and dependency parsing. The ease of use it offers and streamlined API make it a popular choice among developers and researchers working on NLP projects.
spaCy supports more than 75 languages and has 84 trained pipelines for 25 of these languages. It also integrates with modern transformer models like BERT, adding more flexibility for advanced NLP applications.
I chose spaCy for its speed, efficiency, and comprehensive built-in tools. Its straightforward API, support for over 75 languages, and integration with modern transformer models make it ideal for research and software development projects. Its comprehensive support for transformer-based pipelines sets spaCy apart for fast, production-ready text processing, which facilitates smooth integration with models like BERT, GPT-2, and XLNet. Through this integration, users can achieve high accuracy in NLP tasks and also manage to train one model to do several related tasks simultaneously.
Pros and cons Pros Cons Straightforward and user-friendly API Limited flexibility for customization and fine-tuning Popular in the NLP community due to speed and efficiency Requires some programming knowledge to customize models Comprehensive built-in language tools Limited support for deep language generation tasks PricingBest for pre-trained models and customizations
Overall rating: 3.8/5Hugging Face Transformers has established itself as a key player in the natural language processing field. It offers an extensive library of pre-trained models that cater to a range of tasks, from text generation to question answering.
Built primarily for Python, Hugging Face Transformers simplifies working with state-of-the-art models like BERT, GPT-2, RoBERTa, and T5. Developers can access these models through the Hugging Face API and integrate them into applications such as chatbots, translation services, virtual assistants, and voice recognition systems.
Hugging Face is known for its user-friendliness, allowing both beginners and advanced users to utilize powerful AI models without deep-diving into the weeds of machine learning. Its hub houses thousands of community-contributed models, including those fine-tuned for specific use cases like sentiment analysis and question answering.
Hugging Face also supports integration with the popular TensorFlow and PyTorch frameworks, bringing even more flexibility to building and deploying custom models.
I picked Hugging Face Transformers for its huge library of pre-trained models and its flexibility in customization. Its user-friendly interface and support for multiple deep learning frameworks make implementing robust NLP models quick and seamless.
Pros and Cons Pros Cons Extensive model library High resource requirements for larger models Cross-framework compatibility Learning curve for customization Active community and lots of documentation Limited free API access PricingBest for educators and researchers
Overall rating: 3.8/5The Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) is a Python library designed for various NLP tasks, including tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, parsing, and named entity recognition, providing a comprehensive toolkit for teaching, research, and building NLP applications. NLTK also provides access to more than 50 corpora (large collections of text) and lexicons for use in natural language processing projects.
NLTK is widely used in academia and research, garnering major community support. Its ability to process and analyze massive amounts of data is why it's considered a valuable resource for those working on sentiment analysis, text classification, machine translation, and more.
I picked NLTK for its free and open-source format and wide range of functionality. It provides educators and researchers with a plethora of NLP tools and access to various text corpora, making academic and research-based NLP tasks easier and more manageable.
Pros and cons Pros Cons Excellent for academic research and NLP education Not ideal for large-scale, production-level tasks Rich community support and documentation NLTK can be complex for beginners Access to 50+ real-world text corpora and lexicons Lacks modern deep learning tools PricingI evaluated the top NLP tools based on key criteria, including core features, ease of use, integrations, and pricing. These software solutions were chosen for the benefits they offer, including better data analysis, enhanced customer service, and improved communication between humans and computers.
Criteria winner: Hugging Face
Criteria winner: IBM Watson NLU
Criteria winner: Grammarly
Criteria Winner: Multiple winners
FAQs How do natural language processing tools work?NLP tools use algorithms and linguistic rules to analyze and interpret human language. They extract meanings, sentiments, and patterns from text data, which can be used for language translation, chatbots, and text summarization tasks.
What are the applications of natural language processing tools?NLP is a core feature in modern AI models. Applications include sentiment analysis, information retrieval, speech recognition, chatbots, machine translation, text classification, and text summarization.
What is the best NLP software?There's no single best NLP software solution, as the effectiveness of a tool can vary depending on the specific use case and requirements. Our review captured the best tools for different users and use cases.
Generally speaking, an enterprise business user will need a far more robust NLP solution than an academic researcher.
Is ChatGPT an example of an NLP tool?Yes and no. ChatGPT is built on natural language processing techniques and uses deep learning to understand and generate human-like text. This allows it to engage in conversations and handle various language tasks. However, its primary purpose is content generation, rather than traditional NLP tasks like sentiment analysis or named entity recognition.
What are the benefits of natural language processing?NLP makes it easier to automate repetitive tasks, like sorting customer support emails or analyzing feedback. It can quickly scan large amounts of text data to find key insights, helping companies understand customer sentiment or detect trends. NLP also powers virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, allowing for more natural conversations between humans and computers.
Bottom line: Natural language processing software drives AIIn recent years, NLP has become a core part of modern AI, machine learning, and other business applications. Even existing legacy apps are integrating NLP capabilities into their workflows. Incorporating the best NLP software into your workflows will help you maximize several NLP capabilities, including automation, data extraction, and sentiment analysis.
Investing in the best NLP software can help your business streamline processes, gain insights from unstructured data, and improve customer experience. Take the time to research and evaluate different options to find the tool that best meets your organization's needs. Ultimately, the success of your AI strategy will heavily depend on your NLP solution.
Read eWeek's guide to the top AI companies for a detailed portrait of the AI vendors serving a wide array of business needs.
3 Open Source NLP Tools For Data Extraction - InfoWorld
Unstructured text and data are like gold for business applications and the company bottom line, but where to start? Here are three tools worth a look.
Developers and data scientists use generative AI and large language models (LLMs) to query volumes of documents and unstructured data. Open source LLMs, including Dolly 2.0, EleutherAI Pythia, Meta AI LLaMa, StabilityLM, and others, are all starting points for experimenting with artificial intelligence that accepts natural language prompts and generates summarized responses.
"Text as a source of knowledge and information is fundamental, yet there aren't any end-to-end solutions that tame the complexity in handling text," says Brian Platz, CEO and co-founder of Fluree. "While most organizations have wrangled structured or semi-structured data into a centralized data platform, unstructured data remains forgotten and underleveraged."
If your organization and team aren't experimenting with natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, you're probably lagging behind competitors in your industry. In the 2023 Expert NLP Survey Report, 77% of organizations said they planned to increase spending on NLP, and 54% said their time-to-production was a top return-on-investment (ROI) metric for successful NLP projects.
Use cases for NLPIf you have a corpus of unstructured data and text, some of the most common business needs include
Sometimes, having NLP capabilities bundled into a platform or application is desirable. For example, LLMs support asking questions; AI search engines enable searches and recommendations; and chatbots support interactions. Other times, it's optimal to use NLP tools to extract information and enrich unstructured documents and text.
Let's look at three popular open source NLP tools that developers and data scientists are using to perform discovery on unstructured documents and develop production-ready NLP processing engines.
The Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), released in 2001, is one of the older and more popular NLP Python libraries. NLTK boasts more than 11.8 thousand stars on GitHub and lists over 100 trained models.
"I think the most important tool for NLP is by far Natural Language Toolkit, which is licensed under Apache 2.0," says Steven Devoe, director of data and analytics at SPR. "In all data science projects, the processing and cleaning of the data to be used by algorithms is a huge proportion of the time and effort, which is particularly true with natural language processing. NLTK accelerates a lot of that work, such as stemming, lemmatization, tagging, removing stop words, and embedding word vectors across multiple written languages to make the text more easily interpreted by the algorithms."
NLTK's benefits stem from its endurance, with many examples for developers new to NLP, such as this beginner's hands-on guide and this more comprehensive overview. Anyone learning NLP techniques may want to try this library first, as it provides simple ways to experiment with basic techniques such as tokenization, stemming, and chunking.
spaCyspaCy is a newer library, with its version 1.0 released in 2016. SpaCy supports over 72 languages and publishes its performance benchmarks, and it has amassed more than 25,000 stars on GitHub.
"spaCy is a free, open-source Python library providing advanced capabilities to conduct natural language processing on large volumes of text at high speed," says Nikolay Manchev, head of data science, EMEA, at Domino Data Lab. "With spaCy, a user can build models and production applications that underpin document analysis, chatbot capabilities, and all other forms of text analysis. Today, the spaCy framework is one of Python's most popular natural language libraries for industry use cases such as extracting keywords, entities, and knowledge from text."
Tutorials for spaCy show similar capabilities to NLTK, including named entity recognition and part-of-speech (POS) tagging. One advantage is that spaCy returns document objects and supports word vectors, which can give developers more flexibility for performing additional post-NLP data processing and text analytics.
Spark NLPIf you already use Apache Spark and have its infrastructure configured, then Spark NLP may be one of the faster paths to begin experimenting with natural language processing. Spark NLP has several installation options, including AWS, Azure Databricks, and Docker.
"Spark NLP is a widely used open-source natural language processing library that enables businesses to extract information and answers from free-text documents with state-of-the-art accuracy," says David Talby, CTO of John Snow Labs. "This enables everything from extracting relevant health information that only exists in clinical notes, to identifying hate speech or fake news on social media, to summarizing legal agreements and financial news.
Spark NLP's differentiators may be its healthcare, finance, and legal domain language models. These commercial products come with pre-trained models to identify drug names and dosages in healthcare, financial entity recognition such as stock tickers, and legal knowledge graphs of company names and officers.
Talby says Spark NLP can help organizations minimize the upfront training in developing models. "The free and open source library comes with more than 11,000 pre-trained models plus the ability to reuse, train, tune, and scale them easily," he says.
Best practices for experimenting with NLPEarlier in my career, I had the opportunity to oversee the development of several SaaS products built using NLP capabilities. My first NLP was an SaaS platform to search newspaper classified advertisements, including searching cars, jobs, and real estate. I then led developing NLPs for extracting information from commercial construction documents, including building specifications and blueprints.
When starting NLP in a new area, I advise the following:
You may find that the NLP tools used to discover and experiment with new document types will aid in defining requirements. Then, expand the review of NLP technologies to include open source and commercial options, as building and supporting production-ready NLP data pipelines can get expensive. With LLMs in the news and gaining interest, underinvesting in NLP capabilities is one way to fall behind competitors. Fortunately, you can start with one of the open source tools introduced here and build your NLP data pipeline to fit your budget and requirements.
5 Natural Language Processing Libraries To Use - Cointelegraph
Natural language processing (NLP) is important because it enables machines to understand, interpret and generate human language, which is the primary means of communication between people. By using NLP, machines can analyze and make sense of large amounts of unstructured textual data, improving their ability to assist humans in various tasks, such as customer service, content creation and decision-making.
Additionally, NLP can help bridge language barriers, improve accessibility for individuals with disabilities, and support research in various fields, such as linguistics, psychology and social sciences.
Here are five NLP libraries that can be used for various purposes, as discussed below.
NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit)One of the most widely used programming languages for NLP is Python, which has a rich ecosystem of libraries and tools for NLP, including the NLTK. Python's popularity in the data science and machine learning communities, combined with the ease of use and extensive documentation of NLTK, has made it a go-to choice for many NLP projects.
NLTK is a widely used NLP library in Python. It offers NLP machine-learning capabilities for tokenization, stemming, tagging and parsing. NLTK is great for beginners and is used in many academic courses on NLP.
Tokenization is the process of dividing a text into more manageable pieces, like specific words, phrases or sentences. Tokenization aims to give the text a structure that makes programmatic analysis and manipulation easier. A frequent pre-processing step in NLP applications, such as text categorization or sentiment analysis, is tokenization.
Words are derived from their base or root form through the process of stemming. For instance, "run" is the root of the terms "running," "runner," and "run." Tagging involves identifying each word's part of speech (POS) within a document, such as a noun, verb, adjective, etc.. In many NLP applications, such as text analysis or machine translation, where knowing the grammatical structure of a phrase is critical, POS tagging is a crucial step.
Parsing is the process of analyzing the grammatical structure of a sentence to identify the relationships between the words. Parsing involves breaking down a sentence into constituent parts, such as subject, object, verb, etc. Parsing is a crucial step in many NLP tasks, such as machine translation or text-to-speech conversion, where understanding the syntax of a sentence is important.
Related: How to improve your coding skills using ChatGPT?
SpaCySpaCy is a fast and efficient NLP library for Python. It is designed to be easy to use and provides tools for entity recognition, part-of-speech tagging, dependency parsing and more. SpaCy is widely used in the industry for its speed and accuracy.
Dependency parsing is a natural language processing technique that examines the grammatical structure of a phrase by determining the relationships between words in terms of their syntactic and semantic dependencies, and then building a parse tree that captures these relationships.
Stanford CoreNLPStanford CoreNLP is a Java-based NLP library that provides tools for a variety of NLP tasks, such as sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, dependency parsing and more. It is known for its accuracy and is used by many organizations.
Sentiment analysis is the process of analyzing and determining the subjective tone or attitude of a text, while named entity recognition is the process of identifying and extracting named entities, such as names, locations and organizations, from a text.
GensimGensim is an open-source library for topic modeling, document similarity analysis and other NLP tasks. It provides tools for algorithms such as latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) and word2vec for generating word embeddings.
LDA is a probabilistic model used for topic modeling, where it identifies the underlying topics in a set of documents. Word2vec is a neural network-based model that learns to map words to vectors, enabling semantic analysis and similarity comparisons between words.
TensorFlowTensorFlow is a popular machine-learning library that can also be used for NLP tasks. It provides tools for building neural networks for tasks such as text classification, sentiment analysis and machine translation. TensorFlow is widely used in industry and has a large support community.
Classifying text into predetermined groups or classes is known as text classification. Sentiment analysis examines a text's subjective tone to ascertain the author's attitude or feelings. Machines translate text from one language into another. While all use natural language processing techniques, their objectives are distinct.
Can NLP libraries and blockchain be used together?NLP libraries and blockchain are two distinct technologies, but they can be used together in various ways. For instance, text-based content on blockchain platforms, such as smart contracts and transaction records, can be analyzed and understood using NLP approaches.
NLP can also be applied to creating natural language interfaces for blockchain applications, allowing users to communicate with the system using everyday language. The integrity and privacy of user data can be guaranteed by using blockchain to protect and validate NLP-based apps, such as chatbots or sentiment analysis tools.
Related: Data protection in AI chatting: Does ChatGPT comply with GDPR standards?
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