What is natural language processing?
Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of artificial intelligence (AI) that focuses on the interaction between computers and human (natural) languages. It involves the development of algorithms and systems that enable computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language in a way that is both meaningful and useful.
How natural language processing works
NLP encompasses a range of tasks including:
- Text analysis: extracting and interpreting information from written text
- Sentiment analysis: determining the sentiment or emotional tone of a text
- Machine translation: translating text from one language to another
- Speech recognition: converting spoken language into text
- Text-to-speech: converting text into spoken language
- Information retrieval: extracting relevant information from large text datasets
- Named entity recognition (NER): identifying and classifying entities such as names, dates, and locations in text
- Part-of-speech tagging: assigning parts of speech to each word in a sentence
- Language modeling: predicting the probability of a sequence of words
- Question answering: building systems that can answer questions posed in natural language
NLP combines techniques from linguistics, computer science, and machine learning to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data. It is widely used in applications such as search engines, translation services, virtual assistants, and automated customer support.
