Employment of Natural Language Processing within Manufacturing

09 July 2021

The publication of this article has been kindly granted by STAR-EU, an ICT-38 Project Cluster partner.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a subset of Artificial Intelligence that helps identifying key elements from human instructions, extract relevant information and process them in a manner that machines can understand.

Integrating NLP technologies into the system helps machines understand human language and mimic human behaviour. For example, Amazon’s Echo, Microsoft’s Cortana and Apple’s Siri make extensive use of NLP technologies to interact with the users.

NLP technologies can help in the interaction with the machines and speed up the operation of different types of manufacturing systems, cutting down the response time. Imagine a scenario where a manufacturing company hires a data scientist to collect shopfloor worker information and analyse all the machine readings, reporting any sort of problems.

One disadvantage to this scheme is that by the time the management reads the report one problem might have happened causing damage to the entire process. If a computer or robot with sensors and NLP technologies embedded is employed, this might analyse information coming from the machines, reports from customers and information from workers, in order to obtain relevant information about the process. This computer or robot might even communicate with users and accept input in natural language.