Natural Language Understanding is a subtopic of Natural Language Processing in artificial intelligence that deals with machine reading comprehension. It involves modelling human reading comprehension, or, in other words, analysing and translating the input according to natural language principles. Smart speakers, for example, use Natural Language Understanding to be able to respond to the user’s request or command via voice. Systems that use writing, such as chatbots, can also use an NLU-based system. This tool can understand the user’s intention and not just decode words. For example: when a person is using an online restaurant service and asks what flavours of a certain dish are available, the machine is able to interpret that the question has to do with the menu and deliver that option to the customer. But it can only reply with scripted answers. In a simpler system, the customer would have to ask for a menu in order to have his or her request fulfilled. NLU is therefore a tool that approaches human reasoning by reading the intent behind a sentence. Natural Language Understanding works in conjunction with Natural Language Generation, which is the ability of a machine to generate natural language, spoken or written, in response to a user. Together they form a Natural Language Processing system.
