NLP at Scale for Maintenance and Supply Chain Management

Caterpillar, a 90-year-old company, is exploring natural language processing (NLP) for purposes such as vehicle maintenance and supply chain management. NLP enables computers to understand human language, which can be represented naturally by graphs due to their flexibility and structure. The company has been experimenting with various use cases, including a dialog system to interact with machines through queries, and reading warranty documents at scale to extract meaning from large text datasets. Graph databases are being used to model and query these data structures, allowing for the creation of complex relationships and ontologies that can be instantiated in real-world applications. The ultimate goal is to enable computers to understand human language and extract meaning at a large scale, with potential applications in areas such as supply chain management and customer service.