NLP‑based platform as a service: a brief review Sebastião Pais 1,2,3* , João Cordeiro 1,4 and M. Luqman Jamil 1 Introduction Natural language processing (NLP) is a rapidly developing field of artificial intelligence and data science that deals with speech and text processing technologies. e goal of this direction is the development of methods for automatic analysis and human lan- guage presentation [1]. NLP uses a variety of methodologies to interpret the ambigui- ties in human language, including automatic summarization, part-of-speech tagging, disambiguation, entity and relation extraction, sentiment analysis, natural language understanding, and speech recognition. Many NLP-related software tasks have been successfully solved and integrated that are used on the internet, such as morphological Abstract Natural language processing (NLP) refers to the field of study that focuses on the inter- actions between human language and computers. It has recently gained much atten- tion for analyzing human language computationally and has spread its applications for various tasks such as machine translation, information extraction, summarization, question answering, and others. With the rapid growth of cloud computing services, merging NLP in the cloud is a significant benefit. It allows researchers to conduct NLP-related experiments on large amounts of data handled by big data techniques while harnessing the cloud’s vast, on-demand computing power. However, it has not sufficiently spread its tools and applications as a service in the cloud and there is little literature available that discusses the scope of interdisciplinary work. NLP, cloud Com- puting, and big data are vast domains and contain their challenges and potentials. By overcoming those challenges and integrating these fields, great potential for NLP and its applications can be unleashed. This paper presents a survey of NLP in cloud com- puting with a key focus on the comparison of cloud-based NLP services, challenges of NLP and big data while emphasizing the necessity of viable cloud-based NLP services. In the first part of this paper, an overview of NLP is presented by discussing different levels of NLP and components of natural language generation (NLG), followed by the applications of NLP. In the second part, the concept of cloud computing is discussed that highlights the architectural layers and deployment models of cloud computing and cloud-hosted NLP services. In the third part, the field of big data in the cloud is discussed with an emphasis on NLP. Furthermore, information extraction via NLP tech- niques within big data is introduced. Keywords: Natural language processing, Cloud computing, Big data Open Access © The Author(s) 2022. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the mate- rial. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. SURVEY PAPER Pais et al. Journal of Big Data (2022) 9:54 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40537‑022‑00603‑5 *Correspondence: sebastiao@di.ubi.pt 1 Department of Computer Science, University of Beira Interior, Covilha, Portugal Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.