Amazon Comprehend

What is Amazon Comprehend, and how does it use natural language processing?

Before we describe Amazon Comprehend’s functionality, let’s briefly explain what natural language processing (NLP) is and how it works.

What is natural language processing?

Natural language processing (NLP) allows software to intelligently analyze content. This allows it to read, analyze, and extract meaning from various texts—from documents and social media posts to articles.

NLP models can help you quickly identify such elements as entities, keywords, syntax, or numerical data. Moreover, they allow software to extract meaning from texts and understand it. In short, NLP models enable various types of applications to understand and categorize content made by humans.

How does Amazon Comprehend work?

Amazon Comprehend uses the capabilities of natural language processing and machine learning to detect and extract entities, topics, data, names, key phrases, keywords, trends, and sentiments.

What’s more, the service can detect the language in which the text is written and identify the dominant language. Amazon Comprehend offers support for many languages. However, not all functions work with every language. You need to keep this in mind while working with the tool.

Amazon Comprehend is helpful for the following tasks:

• Analyzing user/customer opinions and reviews
• Detecting trends
• Automatic classification of documents and e-mails
• Finding necessary information in collections of documents

Moreover, Amazon Comprehend can process multiple sets of documents at once. It can analyze one to a couple of dozen documents simultaneously.

What’s more, the service can divide sets of documents into categories and assign them to the appropriate sections, for example, according to the topic. You can use an API interface based on JSON format to do this.

Amazon Comprehend’s ability to recognize sentiments in texts is pretty advanced. The service can divide them into four main categories: positive, neutral, negative, and mixed. This makes it easier to analyze customer opinions and product reviews. Organizations can precisely determine how the target audience feels about a specific product.

Amazon Comprehend — use cases

Amazon Comprehend can support organizations and applications in various ways. The most popular use cases include the following:

Analysis of customer and user opinions

Amazon Comprehend can effectively analyze user opinions and reviews. Thanks to advanced technology, it can understand texts and extract sentiments. This allows organizations to discover how customers feel about their products. It also answers the question: Is the reaction to the product negative or positive? Additionally, Amazon Comprehend provides insight into the quality of user experience and what makes it better or worse.

Text analysis

Thanks to semantic search, Amazon Comprehend can analyze content to find keywords, key phrases, sentiments, etc. You can use this, for example, to analyze articles or product reviews. This allows you to extract the context and meaning of the text. Additionally, it enables you to understand better interactions with customers everywhere on the Internet (e.g., social media posts, forums, comments under a blog post).

Organization of knowledge bases

Amazon Comprehend makes it easier to organize knowledge bases by categorizing documents according to the topic, visible trends, or other criteria. This allows you to find necessary documents quickly. Thanks to the categorized content base, you can also offer users content on similar topics.

Processing of business documentation

In addition to detecting keywords and key phrases, Amazon Comprehend recognizes various types of numerical data, accelerating the processing of business documentation. The service allows you to efficiently extract necessary data from invoices, contracts, and insurance documents.

Support for customer service

Amazon Comprehend supports the customer service process by categorizing support tickets according to content — posts on forums, customer service requests, product reviews, or forms. This allows companies to discover problems and identify reasons for dissatisfaction quickly.

Advantages of Amazon Comprehend

Besides many use cases, Amazon Comprehend also has other advantages. The service has features that allow you to use it for various purposes — whether for an organization or a new product.

Customization of NLP models for specific use cases

Amazon Comprehend uses machine learning and database access to customize NLP models for a specific use case. This allows organizations to use their own databases for training models so they can detect given types of information through automatic machine learning.

Apart from custom categories, companies can define their own keywords and key phrases. Thanks to this, the model detects elements that align with its purpose. For example, a model for analyzing invoices detects the pre-defined numerical data.

Integration of NLPs with applications

Amazon Comprehend allows developers to integrate NLP models with applications thanks to the simple API interface. This will enable applications to use the potential of natural language processing and achieve business goals.

Access to the AWS environment

By combining many other services from the AWS suite, Amazon Comprehend has access to an environment that contains all the necessary tools for creating NLP models. The Amazon S3 service stores data and AWS Identity and Access Management allows developers to safely manage Amazon Comprehend’s work and create user groups with appropriate permissions.

Detection of personally identifiable information

Amazon Comprehend recognizes personally identifiable information (PII). The service finds data on clients, labels it appropriately, and redacts it to protect their privacy.

Redaction is the process of replacing personally identifiable information with a character string that can’t be read. This allows companies to comply with GDPR.

Amazon Comprehend can detect the following types of PII:

• Personal information (name, surname, home address, e-mail address, telephone number)
• Financial information (credit card data, information on invoices)
• Technical information (IP addresses, passwords, logins)

Analysis of sets of documents

Amazon Comprehend can analyze multiple sets of documents in one go. The service allows organizations to process millions of documents and quickly identify necessary data. This significantly speeds up information gathering, so companies can focus on developing solutions and improving processes.

Summary

Amazon Comprehend is a service from the AWS suite that uses machine learning and natural language processing to analyze various types of content. The service can understand human-made content and extract keywords, key phrases, topics, numerical data, and users' sentiments.

With Amazon Comprehend, organizations can better understand users' sentiments and reactions to their products. Analyzing opinions, reviews, or social media posts allows them to collect data on customer satisfaction and plan product development based on it.

Moreover, companies can use Amazon Comprehend to organize knowledge bases, making searching for the necessary content easier and faster.