What is Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Definition

Natural language processing (NLP) is the field of AI focused on enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language, powering tasks such as translation, sentiment analysis, entity extraction, summarisation, and question answering over text and speech.

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Lets software understand and act on unstructured human language
Automates text tasks like classification, extraction, and summarisation at scale
Powers translation, sentiment analysis, and conversational interfaces
Unlocks insight from the large share of data that exists as free text

Real World Example

An airline uses NLP to analyse thousands of customer reviews, automatically extracting topics and sentiment so it can see that delays and seat comfort drive most negative feedback without anyone reading each review.

FAQs

What tasks does NLP cover?

Translation, sentiment analysis, named-entity recognition, summarisation, classification, and question answering, among others.

How has NLP changed recently?

Transformer-based models and LLMs have dramatically improved NLP, enabling far more fluent understanding and generation than earlier methods.

What is the challenge in NLP?

Human language is ambiguous, context-dependent, and varied, making accurate understanding and generation genuinely difficult.