NLG – top technology of 2021

Natural Language Generation (NLG) has been chosen by the MIT Technology Review as one of the emerging technologies of 2021. It’s been 20 years since this prestigious publication has released its list of the year’s most important technologies or developments. But this year, NLG technology has managed to impress them. 

Natural Language Generation, or NLG, is a subdomain of artificial intelligence. It can extract and process large amounts of data and then convert that information into human language. Effectively, the technology is capable of telling a story in the same way that a person would. Pretty amazing, right? In this post we will show you where NLG shows up in real life, what it can do for companies and what lies in store for the future.

It’s no wonder it caught the attention of MIT Technology Review. And why do you think the publication chose this technology? The year 2020 really showcased natural language generation technology thanks to the incredible advances of GPT-3 that astonished the entire world.

GPT-3, the model that impressed the world

At Narrativa we have already spoken to you about GPT-3 technology. GPT-3 is a language model developed by OpenAI (an initiative pioneered by Elon Musk). It learns from pre-existing text and is able to complete sentences using different alternatives (similar to predictive text). But GPT-3 doesn’t come out of the box like that, you have to train it with thousands and thousands of examples, a task that so far has only been done in English.

However, once trained, it saves a lot of time and manages variability and linguistic richness, all with perfect grammar. In addition, it is capable of answering a wide variety of questions. How does it do that?

• With 175 billion parameters.
• A training program comprising 500 billion words.
• A level of reading comprehension superior to that of the average human being.
• Almost $5 million invested in training.

You can read more details about this technology in this post.

The Wall Street Journal uses Narrativa’s NLG platform

At Narrativa we were amongst the first to apply this technology in the real world. When we started our journey in 2015, we began solving some of the problems involved in content generation by using our artificial intelligence system.

From data to text

These days, companies rely more and more on the generation of natural language as a tool to optimize their processes. This is the case with The Wall Street Journal, who this month shared their success story with Narrativa on Medium. Bloomberg and Morgan Stanley have also seen the potential of NLG.

At Narrativa, we have developed a platform dedicated to providing natural language solutions, which allows us to generate 3,000 mobile descriptions in seconds, create financial alerts or write a clinical paper in two simple steps.

NLG, a company’s greatest ally 

All those people who introduced NLG into their companies understood one thing: here was a solution which was going to alleviate workload and increase productivity and efficiency, without employees having to spend hours and hours on tasks that can be easily automated.

They are usually repetitive and time-consuming tasks which do not require any special knowledge. These kinds of tasks don’t do anything to enhance the creativity of employees and can lead to frustration.

Although NLG has managed to capture the attention of some companies who see how it can help them in the development of their tasks, there is still a long way to go. Many mistrust the technology and also don’t fully understand what NLG can actually contribute to their companies.

If you want to know more about how we can help your company through NLG, do not hesitate to contact us. We will have the perfect solution for your company.

NLG – top technology of 2021