| | JANUARY8CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONBy Erin Boyd, Head of Commercial and CX Data Sciences, The AES CorporationNATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND FORECASTING OF ENERGY PRICES­A MASSIVELY MISSED OPPORTUNITY FOR OUR INDUSTRYNatural language processing-while you may not know it by its official name, this field of artificial intelligence is no doubt an inescapable part of your daily life. Whether it be asking Alexa the temperature, dictating to Siri a text message, verbally providing your four-digit pin after stating the reason you're calling the bank, all before ever speaking with a live agent, even your spam filter and spell check, these are but a handful of the countless examples of natural language processing's pervasiveness in everyone's everyday life. Natural language processing, or NLP, is a field of artificial intelligence that enables computers to understand, interpret and manipulate human language. Combining the power of computer science and computational linguistics to make human language intelligible to machines, NLP enables your computer to extract meaning from text and speech and respond or react appropriately. The power and potential use of NLP is immense. Large scale analysis can be automatically performed to glean insights and meaning from massive amounts of unstructured text data - think social media comments, customer support tickets, online reviews, news reports, etc. Routine processes can be automated in real-term to efficiently and accurately sort and route information 24 hours a day and without the need to ever interact with a human. The sentiment of your customers about your company and their interactions with it can be quickly gleaned. For an industry ripe with complexity and industry-specific language, NLP is a boon as it can be tailored to the energy industry's many intricacies and Erin Boyd
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