What is NLP?
NLP means Natural Language processing - a set of algorithms and techniques that allow computers to get at the content of sentences spoken by human beings. Typical NLP tasks are:
- Find all the people, places and things spoken about in a document or webpage.
- Identify the linguistic style, reading age or even the mood or of the person who is speaking.
- Identify the topic that is being talked about.
How does it change how we do research?
NLP is often applied to social listening data, but the results are often poor because people don’t always talk about what you want them to talk about, and because you often don’t know who the audience is that you’re analysing.
At the same time there is a misconception that NLP requires an enormous amount of data. This is not true.
NLP-Powered Research involves asking a small but representative sample of your audience(s) a set of clear, pointed open text questions around the topic you’re interested in. NLP is then applied to the results to turn these text responses into meaningful insights. We then use, among other things, Data Visualisation to bring the results to life.
Where have we used it?
Partnering with Wonder&Wonder, Coppelia has used NLP-powered research to inform product design and understand the needs of subscription TV viewers. Coppelia has also used this technique to help Here I am analyse the data gathered by its ethical research platform Fatima.
