Natural Language Processing or NLP is a field of Artificial Intelligence that gives computers the ability to read, interpret, manipulate, understand and derive meaning from human languages. NLP draws from many disciplines, including computer science and computational linguistics, in its pursuit to fill the gap between human communication and computer understanding.

Why is it important for the financial industry?

Complex data extracted from financial documents such as PDF, Word, Excel and email are examples of unstructured data. Unstructured data doesn’t fit neatly into the traditional rows and columns of relational databases, and represent the vast majority of financial data available in the actual world.

Natural language is primarily hard because it is messy, ambiguous, ever-changing and evolving.