NLP in SMEs for industry 4.0: opportunities and challenges

Natural Language Processing is the field of Computer Science that focuses on analyzing and processing natural language, mainly human text or speech. Recent trends in Natural Language Processing have led to the development of Large Language Models (LLMs): huge models trained on high amounts of data that achieve unprecedented performances in many tasks, such as answering questions, summarizing texts, or coding. These new tools have a wide range of applications and are being developed by many companies. However, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) struggle to implement these new technologies, mainly because of the lack of resources. This paper aims to show the opportunities and challenges related to NLP-based solutions in SMEs based on a literature review. The main result is that NLP-based solutions have a wide range of applications in various companies, including SMEs, and may lead to many changes. However, there are still many obstacles to developing these tools in SMEs: SMEs lack specialized know-how to develop these solutions and do not often have standardized data. Moreover, there exists nearly no support for SMEs in the scientific literature to develop these tools.