Steve Shellman heads Strategic Analysis Enterprises, Inc., an organization that uses academic methodologies and complex techniques such as named-entity extraction and natural language processing to provide innovative solutions for strategic planning. Natural language processing (NLP) began in the 1950s in intelligence and automatic translation and concerns language interactions between computers and humans, allowing computers to understand human speech in real-time, though speech contains ambiguity. Currently, NLP uses machine learning to examine patterns and expand comprehension, being applied to fields like named-entity extraction, deep analytics, and opinion mining.