Natural Language Processing

Natural language processing is the set of methods that let machines work with human language — reading text, understanding speech, generating responses, and extracting structured information from unstructured words. The field sits at the intersection of linguistics, computer science, and machine learning.

You encounter NLP every time you use a search engine, ask a voice assistant a question, read a machine-translated article, or receive an auto-generated email summary. Behind each of these is a system that converts raw language into representations a computer can operate on, then maps those representations to useful outputs.

Why NLP exists