TL;DR Natural language processing enables computers to understand and generate human language, allowing them to interact with us more naturally.
Natural language processing is the branch of AI focused on teaching computers to interpret, generate, and work with human language. It blends linguistics, computer science, and machine learning to build systems that can read text, understand meaning, extract information, answer questions, and communicate in ways that feel intuitive to humans.
NLP enables computers to understand everyday language rather than forcing us to speak in code. It powers things like chatbots, search engines, translation tools, and voice assistants. When you get a brilliant reply suggestion, ask your phone a question, or translate a phrase online, NLP is working behind the scenes to make language feel effortless.
NLP integrates linguistic structure, tokenization, statistical modeling, embeddings, sequence models, transformers, and large language models to create systems capable of semantic understanding and generation. Core tasks include NER, POS tagging, dependency parsing, sentiment analysis, MT, IR, summarization, and QA. Modern NLP emphasizes pretrained foundation models, attention mechanisms, fine-tuning, retrieval augmentation, and efficient inference strategies.
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Language understanding and semantic interpretation
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Text generation and summarization
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Translation and multilingual processing
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Information extraction and retrieval
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Question answering and dialogue systems
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Applications in search, assistants, and content analysis
ELI5 NLP is like teaching a computer to read, listen, and speak so it can understand what we say and respond in a way that makes sense.