Natural Language Processing, or NLP, is the area of AI concerned with helping computers understand, interpret and generate human language. It covers everything from spam filtering and autocomplete to translation, sentiment analysis and the chatbots built on large language models.
Human language is hard for computers because it is full of ambiguity, context and exceptions — the same word can mean different things, and meaning often depends on tone or situation. Modern NLP uses machine learning to handle that messiness by learning patterns from real text rather than relying on hand-written grammar rules. Most AI tools that read or write text are, under the hood, doing NLP.
Related terms
Large Language Model (LLM) · Machine Learning (ML)