Browse Microsoft Certification Guides

Azure AI-900 NLP Tasks Guide

Study Azure AI-900 NLP Tasks: key concepts, common traps, and exam decision cues.

NLP questions on AI-900 are mostly about separating what is being analyzed and what form the language takes. If the requirement starts from written text, audio, translation, or next-word prediction, that clue usually decides the workload.

Core language workloads

Workload Strong clue Typical result
sentiment analysis “Is this feedback positive or negative?” tone classification
entity recognition “Pull names, dates, or organizations from text” structured items from text
key phrase extraction “Find the main phrases in this article” important phrases
translation “Convert text or speech to another language” output in a different language
speech recognition “Turn spoken words into text” transcript
speech synthesis “Read this text aloud” generated speech audio
language modeling “Predict likely word sequences or language patterns” text-probability behavior

Text-first vs audio-first

If the input or output starts with… Strong first lane
written text language workload
audio or spoken words speech workload

Translation can appear in both lanes. If the scenario is about typed text, think text translation. If the scenario begins with spoken input or spoken output, speech is often the stronger first fit.

Commonly confused pairs

Pair Keep this distinction clear
sentiment analysis vs generative AI analyze tone in existing text vs create new text
speech recognition vs OCR audio-to-text vs image-to-text
entity recognition vs classification extract structured items vs assign a category
language modeling vs search predicting language patterns vs retrieving documents

What strong answers usually do

  • notice whether the starting material is text or audio
  • separate analysis of existing language from generation of new language
  • recognize translation as a language task rather than a machine-learning technique category
  • treat language modeling as an NLP concept, not automatically as a platform-choice question

Decision order that usually wins

  1. Classify the task as analyze text sentiment, extract structured text details, transcribe audio, or group unlabeled text.
  2. If the system should detect tone in written text, think sentiment analysis.
  3. If the system should pull names, dates, or organizations from text, think entity recognition.
  4. If the scenario starts from spoken audio, think speech recognition before text-only NLP.
  5. AI-900 usually rewards staying at the workload level rather than jumping straight to product names.

Quiz

Loading quiz…
Revised on Sunday, May 10, 2026