Data science in light of natural language processing: An overview

Abstract

The focus of data scientists is essentially divided into three areas: collecting data, analyzing data, and inferring information from data. Each one of these tasks requires special personnel, takes time, and costs money. Yet, the next and the fastidious step is how to turn data into products. Therefore, this field grabs the attention of many research groups in academia as well as industry. In the last decades, data-driven approaches came into existence and gained more popularity because they require much less human effort. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is strongly among the fields influenced by data. The growth of data is behind the performance improvement of most NLP applications such as machine translation and automatic speech recognition. Consequently, many NLP applications are frequently moving from rule-based systems and knowledge-based methods to data-driven approaches. However, collected data that are based on undefined design criteria or on technically unsuitable forms will be useless. Also, they will be neglected if the size is not enough to perform the required analysis and to infer the accurate information. The chief purpose of this overview is to shed some lights on the vital role of data in various fields and give a better understanding of data in light of NLP. Expressly, it describes what happen to data during its life-cycle: building, processing, analyzing, and exploring phases.