What is Natural Language Processing?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a type of artificial intelligence that enables computers to evaluate and understand human language in order to process and analyse large amounts of natural language data.

If you have ever used Alexa, Siri, Cortana, or any other ‘Smart Assistant’, it will have used Natural Language Processing to provide a response to your queries or demands. This is a relatively commercial application of NLP – voice assistants demonstrate only a fraction of what it can do. NLP isn’t just about speech but also about text; working on everything from search engines to email spam filtering, online translations to spell-checking, and more. 

How does NLP benefit regulatory compliance? 

NLP presents a huge number of opportunities to simplify and improve the way that businesses work. For technology-savvy companies, NLP is a game changer. This is especially true for those dealing with regulatory legislation, which can generate hundreds of thousands of lines of text, with each sentence having a varying level of complexity and nuance. 

Thanks to advances in technology, NLP has moved beyond interpreting text based on keywords alone and can now understand and decode the semantics behind those words or sentences. This makes it possible to detect deeper meaning and helps improve the categorisation of what is being said. 

For financial institutions, this technology helps risk and compliance officers drill down to the exact regulatory obligations that their business must meet, removing the often-laborious manual process of researching, reading, and analysing vast amounts of data. For example, the NLP capabilities that have been built within CUBE help each customer understand their specific business requirements that stem from a certain regulation – it maps and tailors the proper regulatory obligations to each customer and their specific policies. 

What does the future hold?

As regulatory obligations continue to evolve, systems that can discover, read, translate (if required), and interpret large and complex legal texts directly from the source will become invaluable – if not essential – for financial institutions. Not only do they allow firms to save time and resources, but also money in the form of saving on expensive regulatory legal and translation fees. 

There are myriad other applications for NLP when it comes to complex compliance. If you have any questions about how the CUBE can help your business with its compliance needs, please feel free to reach out and one of our experts will get back in contact.