Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning with Jessica Peck
Agency Ahead by Traject
English - October 02, 2020 10:00 - 22 minutes - 30.8 MB - ★★★★★ - 5 ratingsMarketing Business Entrepreneurship marketing digital marketing agency software seo social media reputation customer experience local seo local search Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Jessica Peck is the Senior Consultant for Digital Analytics for CVS by day. By night, she runs all sorts of cool side experiments to become a better SEO. She's become quite the expert on natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning as they relate to how people are searching, and as it relates to how Google is continuing to try to provide the best search results for its end users.
If you're curious about how you should be adjusting your strategy in light of Google's ever-increasing intelligence, this is the podcast to catch.
The highlights:
[2:43] How Jessica got started.
[4:25] On training Natural Language Processing.
[7:25] Is NLP accessible to the average SEO person?
[9:17] Practical applications for NLP in SEO.
[13:04] The flaws in NLP.
[14:55] Why humans have to stay involved in the process.
[16:23] Other uses for NLP.
[20:14] Jessica's causes.
The insights:
How Jessica Got Started with Natural Language Processing
Jessica has been online since she was 11 years old, and started doing some site-building work in college. She ended up in an administrative position where she asked to work on the company's website. The company didn't have a marketing budget, so she turned to SEO to help them get the word out.
Having to figure things out for herself got her into the habit of experimentation. She puts up her side sites to run them.
She says all this poking and prodding is what launched her interest in NLP.
SEO is this application of NLP in a weird way, and I think you can learn a lot from just how machines access language."
On Training NLP
Jessica says that she finds one particular aspect of NLP very interesting indeed.
She speaks of a few of her linguist friends who have done a lot of research on how the people who create these algorithms have biases.
Is NLP accessible to the average SEO person?
She recommends beginning with the Google Assistant App and the Google Cloud NLP.
The Google Cloud NLP
I think creating and building Google Assistant apps is something that teaches you a lot about how people think and communicate with search in a way that you don't really get when you're looking at keyword lists. Because you start looking at the construction of synonyms and entities and how questions get rooted around certain ideas and which parts of a sentence are the parts a machine is going to focus on."
Jessica says you don't have to have a deep coding background to dive in.
Practical Applications for NLP in SEO
She says that if you know how Google or Bing is looking at a page you can tweak the page to get it closer to what you're trying to rank for.
In short: you take the way that Google sees your website and the content you've created. You get a sense of what the associated entities are. Then that influences the content you build out, ultimately helping you become more visible, drive more traffic, and increase your rankings on the keywords that matter most to your business.
The Flaws in NLP
If you want to train an NLP algorithm to read reviews and delete them if they're irrelevant obscene, then you're going to have to train it on a bunch of reviews you think are good."
So far so good. What goes wrong?
She says the key to defeating this flaw is to keep humans involved in the process.
She gives another example.
She says that because humans are fundamentally bad at being logical about language, there will always be things the machine won't be able to catch.
Other Uses for NLP
Despite these flaws, there are a lot of uses for NLP that aren't limited by these algorithms.
She says there are some articles that NLP does a better job of writing than humans do.
There aren't very many creative writing majors who really want to write about the meaning of Disney's stock decreasing."
She also brought up Amazon, and how they seem to be using NLP to analyze product reviews.
This is why most big tech companies are reviewing things with NLP first, and then their second level will be human reviewers, but they rely on people who are not employees to point out where the human reviewers are needed."
She says this is how YouTube does things too.
What’s your right now cause?
If you're in Massachusetts, Jessica urges you to "vote Yes on 2." This is a ranked-choice voting initiative happening statewide.
If you're not in Massachusetts she asks you to send some money to the Homeless Black Trans Women Fund. "It's a fund for a small community of Black trans women living on the streets of Atlanta."
Connect with Jessica Peck
Want to get more insights from Jessica?
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