What is the “AI Natural Language API” add-on?

This WPSOLR extension connects WordPress to external APIs providing a world-class Natural Language Processing service.

What “NLP” or “Natural Language Processing” stands for?

Natural Language is an old discipline, but with very recent technological progress.

The mean of NLP was to introduce human comprehension in texts. Understanding entities like persons, dates, locations, events. Or sentiments (good, bad, neutral).

But until recently, the results were not so great. In fact, until the arrival of Artificial Intelligence (AI), also named Deep Learning (DL).

Rather than building a huge set of rules, AI is able to build its own rules by learning from a huge corpus of texts (for instance, Wikipedia).

Why commercial APIs rather than Open Source?

NLP requires sophisticated models and tools. This is why we need to borrow them from specialised companies.

And the best way to connect to those company NLP services are APIs.

Of course, one could argue there are some Open source NLP components that could be used instead.
This is true, for instance OpenNLP, or CoreNLP.

But they require numerous skills, both in technical and in AI.

How does that work in principles?

Let imagine you have some posts or pages with some great textual content. But you feel that you cannot really use the meaning of those texts.

For instance, you’d like to filter your content by person names, or by location, or by dates, or by events.

One solution could be to tag manually all your content. But it requires super-human knowledge, as no one is supposed to recognize millions of persons, locations, dates, or events. And it would take forever.

Instead, let NLP APIs do the tagging for you. It’s called “Entity extraction”.

So, now all your texts are tagged. But you need now to convert them to filters (aka facets).

Well, this is exactly what WPSOLR does automatically for you:
a) It calls the NLP API of your choice on your texts (posts, pages, …)

b) It gets the tags back from the NLP API
c) It indexes the text with its tags

d) It exposes the tags as filters (aka facets) during the search

What is the cost?

1. The WPSOLR’s NLP add-on is part of WPSOLR, therefore included in the WPSOLR PRO license.
2. But the NLP APIs are commercial licenses. You will have to create an account there, and pay accordingly to their pricing scheme. Usually, pricing is based on the number of calls.