NLP-Based Tools for Decoding the Language of Life

As the scientific know-how of the people around the world is expanding, the requirement of new technologies is also growing rapidly. This is evident by the number of papers being published and the new discoveries of scientists that are changing the definition of impossibility day by day. This paper explains one such technology which has made possible not only the recognition of natural language (i.e., human language) by computers but generation of speech and text which is natural language processing (NLP). When machine learning came into picture for assaying large amount data (statistical), deriving meaning from data became easy. Statistical prediction could be made for data containing millions of data points. However, analysis and prediction from textual data still remained a challenge. In 1950s, Alan Turing’s publication—Computing Machinery and Intelligence, introduced NLP in computational field which dealt with conversion of human language to machine-readable form and generated written or spoken output. NLP can be further be applied in bioinformatics for deducing the structure and function of a protein from its primary chain sequence or deriving end products of functional genes from their basal sequences as many researchers have found the sequences to be similar to human language calling it the ‘language of life’. Current studies are based upon using the rules of NLP in analyzing gene and protein sequences. This article is aimed at exploring the various applications of natural language processing in the field of bioinformatics and medical informatics.