A Holistic Exploration of Natural Language Processing: Challenges, Milestones, and Research Frontiers

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a rapidly evolving field with diverse applications, from chatbots to translation services. This survey offers a comprehensive exploration of NLP, covering its fundamentals, challenges, literature, structured model comparison, and research gaps. The introduction clarifies NLP's core concepts and applications. We then delve into its multifaceted challenges, spanning complex multimodal understanding to ethical issues like bias and fairness. This sets the stage for literature review, highlighting milestones like BERT and GPT-3. We provide a tabular comparison of influential models, elucidating their features, strengths, and limitations. Beyond reviewing past achievements, we spotlight critical research gaps—multimodal understanding, commonsense reasoning, bias mitigation, multilingualism, and ethics. Addressing these gaps is vital for responsible NLP advancement. In summation, paper offers a comprehensive and holistic view of the expansive field of NLP. It skillfully combines introductory concepts, a navigational guide through the realm of challenges, a detailed literature review, structured model comparisons, and a forward-looking perspective on the pressing research gaps. We aspire for this paper to emerge as an invaluable resource, serving as a guiding light for the research pursuits of scholars, the practical endeavors of practitioners, and the policy considerations of stakeholders within the expansive and dynamic NLP community. Its overarching objective is to steer future research initiatives toward the crucial task of addressing these pivotal gaps, thereby propelling the field into new horizons of knowledge and application.