Amazon Comprehend FAQs

General

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a way for computers to analyze, understand, and derive meaning from textual information in a smart and useful way. By utilizing NLP, you can extract important phrases, sentiment, syntax, key entities such as brand, date, location, person, etc., and the language of the text.

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to find meaning and insights in text.

You can use Amazon Comprehend to identify the language of the text, extract key phrases, places, people, brands, or events, understand sentiment about products or services, and identify the main topics from a library of documents. The source of this text could be web pages, social media feeds, emails, or articles. You can also feed Amazon Comprehend a set of text documents, and it will identify topics (or group of words) that best represent the information in the collection. The output from Amazon Comprehend can be used to understand customer feedback, provide a better search experience through search filters and uses topics to categorize documents.

You can get started with Amazon Comprehend from the AWS console. Your free tier for 12 months starts from the time you submit your first request. See product documentation on how to use Amazon Comprehend APIs in your application.

The most common use cases include:

Voice of customer analytics: You can gauge whether customer sentiment is positive, neutral, negative, or mixed based on the feedback you receive via support calls, emails, social media, and other online channels.

Semantic search: You can use Amazon Comprehend to provide a better search experience by enabling your search engine to index key phrases, entities, and sentiment. This enables you to focus the search on the intent and the context of the articles instead of basic keywords.

Knowledge management and discovery: You can analyze a collection of documents and automatically organize them by topic. You can then use the topics to personalize content for your customers.

No, you don’t need NLP expertise to use Amazon Comprehend. You only need to call Amazon Comprehend’s API, and the service will handle the machine learning required to extract the relevant data from the text.

Amazon Comprehend is a fully managed and continuously trained service, so you don’t have to manage the scaling of resources, maintenance of code, or maintaining the training data.

Yes, Amazon Comprehend uses machine learning is continuously being trained to make it better for your use cases.

For a list of the supported Amazon Comprehend AWS regions, please visit the AWS Region Table for all AWS global infrastructure. Also for more information, see Regions and Endpoints in the AWS General Reference.

Requests to the Amazon Comprehend API and console are made over a secure (SSL) connection. You can use AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) to control which IAM users have access to specific Amazon Comprehend actions and resources.

Usage

You can use user Amazon Comprehend to read your data from Amazon S3. You can also write the results from Amazon Comprehend to a storage service, database, or data warehouse.

For text analysis APIs, you will receive an HTTP status code of 200 indicating successful processing. If your data can't be processed or exceeds service limits, you will get an appropriate HTTP error code.

The service will return a confidence score for each result. Low confidence scores mean that the service’s confidence is low that it is correct. Conversely, if the service is highly confident, the score will be closer to 1.

No. At the current time, Comprehend does not support custom models.

Pricing

Refer to the Amazon Comprehend pricing page to learn more about pricing tiers and discounts.

Data privacy

Amazon Comprehend may store and use text inputs processed by the service solely to provide and maintain the service and to develop and improve the quality of Amazon Comprehend and other Amazon machine-learning/artificial-intelligence technologies. This does not apply to Amazon Comprehend Medical and Amazon Comprehend Detect PII. Use of your content is important for continuous improvement of your Amazon Comprehend customer experience, including the development and training of related technologies. We do not use any personally identifiable information that may be contained in your content to target products, services or marketing to you or your end users. Your trust, privacy, and the security of your content are our highest priority and we implement appropriate and sophisticated technical and physical controls, including encryption at rest and in transit, designed to prevent unauthorized access to, or disclosure of, your content and ensure that our use complies with our commitments to you. Please see https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-privacy-faq/ for more information. You may opt out of having your content used to improve and develop the quality of Amazon Comprehend and other Amazon machine-learning/artificial-intelligence technologies by using an AWS Organizations opt-out policy. For information about how to opt out, see Managing AI services opt-out policy.

Only authorized employees will have access to your content that is processed by Amazon Comprehend. Your trust, privacy, and the security of your content are our highest priority and we implement appropriate and sophisticated technical and physical controls, including encryption at rest and in transit, designed to prevent unauthorized access to, or disclosure of, your content and ensure that our use complies with our commitments to you. Please see the AWS data privacy FAQs for more information.

You always retain ownership of your content and we will only use your content with your consent.

Any content processed by Amazon Comprehend is encrypted and stored at rest in the AWS region where you are using Amazon Comprehend. Some portion of content processed by Amazon Comprehend may be stored in another AWS region solely in connection with the continuous improvement and development of your Amazon Comprehend customer experience and other Amazon machine-learning/artificial-intelligence technologies. This does not apply Amazon Comprehend Medical. Your trust, privacy, and the security of your content are our highest priority and we implement appropriate and sophisticated technical and physical controls, including encryption at rest and in transit, designed to prevent unauthorized access to, or disclosure of, your content and ensure that our use complies with our commitments to you. Please see the https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-privacy-faq/ for more information.

Yes, subject to your compliance with the Amazon Comprehend Service Terms, including your obligation to provide any required notices and obtain any required verifiable parental consent under COPPA, you may use Amazon Comprehend in connection with websites, programs, or other applications that are directed or targeted, in whole or in part, to children under age 13.

For information about the requirements of COPPA and guidance for determining whether your website, program, or other application is subject to COPPA, please refer directly to the resources provided and maintained by the United States Federal Trade Commission. This site also contains information regarding how to determine whether a service is directed or targeted, in whole or in part, to children under age 13.