For a great overview of Google’s Natural Language Processing tool, check out this video from my fellow Canadian Chris Labbate of seobank.ca.

Full disclosure here, I buried the lede of this note. So if you’re already familiar with Google’s Natural Language tool, please skip ahead to the end to get to the juicy part.

As Steven Kang posted, it’s not perfect, but it is still super cool.

I’d like to preface this note and mention that Google’s cloud services such as the Natural Language API and the Google Vision API should be giving SEOs a major window into their technologies. If you’re not currently paying attention to what’s going over on cloud.google.com it’s better late than never. Who knows how long these tools will remain public, so let’s take advantage of them while we can… because we all know Google giveth and Google taketh away.

I’m going to focus on:

https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/

The free version available for you to use allows you to upload one piece of text at a time. Google will then extract entities, sentiment, syntax and categories from the corpus of text you entered. For example, let’s take this article from CNN:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/12/world/osiris-rex-asteroid-sample-site-scn/index.html

Here’s its breakdown...

Entities:

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s704/sh/21dec580-40b5-48b8-896d-a9c0fb86ee05/c53bcf9f92090ad6/res/54e776a1-6d82-4ea1-a367-0d2584850017/

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s704/sh/21dec580-40b5-48b8-896d-a9c0fb86ee05/c53bcf9f92090ad6/res/af319c23-acf0-4b42-80af-bef0f4940a56/

Sentiment:

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s704/sh/21dec580-40b5-48b8-896d-a9c0fb86ee05/c53bcf9f92090ad6/res/eb8f823a-1a31-4c91-92e5-2181c0c7f43b/

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s704/sh/21dec580-40b5-48b8-896d-a9c0fb86ee05/c53bcf9f92090ad6/res/2378f64e-cf81-4fbf-9892-a128b363132e/

Syntax analysis likely plays into the BERT algorithm:

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s704/sh/21dec580-40b5-48b8-896d-a9c0fb86ee05/c53bcf9f92090ad6/res/6f9c506d-b545-4458-a4a2-046f6a9f14e0/

Then finally categories:

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s704/sh/21dec580-40b5-48b8-896d-a9c0fb86ee05/c53bcf9f92090ad6/res/055fa682-57f8-4d7b-85a0-1400331c6292/