Natural Language Processing

What is natural language processing?

Natural language processing (NLP) is the ability of a computer program to understand human language as it's spoken and written -- referred to as natural language. It's a component of artificial intelligence (AI).

NLP has existed for more than 50 years and has roots in the field of linguistics. It has a variety of real-world applications in numerous fields, including medical research, search engines and business intelligence.

How does natural language processing work?

NLP uses many different techniques to enable computers to understand natural language as humans do. Whether the language is spoken or written, natural language processing can use AI to take real-world input, process it and make sense of it in a way a computer can understand. Just as humans have different sensors -- such as ears to hear and eyes to see -- computers have programs to read and microphones to collect audio. And just as humans have a brain to process that input, computers have a program to process their respective inputs. At some point in processing, the input is converted to code that the computer can understand. There are two main phases to natural language processing: data preprocessing and algorithm development.