Before 2017, NLP relied on RNNs/LSTMs, which processed words sequentially. The (introduced in "Attention Is All You Need") introduced two breakthroughs:

| Domain | Example use | |--------|--------------| | Healthcare | Extracting symptoms from clinical notes; drug interaction detection | | Finance | Sentiment analysis for trading; automated earnings report summarization | | Customer service | Chatbots, intent classification, automated ticket routing | | Legal | Contract analysis, due diligence, precedent retrieval | | Search engines | Understanding user queries beyond keyword matching | | Education | Automated essay scoring, plagiarism detection | | Social media | Content moderation, trend detection, hate speech identification |