AI Glossary Term

What does “Natural Language Processing (NLP)” mean?

Definition

The branch of AI focused on understanding and generating human language.

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How Natural Language Processing (NLP) works

Diagram for Natural Language Processing (NLP), steps in order: Human language: text or speech; then Split and represent: tokens, embeddings; then Model: understand or generate; then Task: translate, summarize, answer.Human language: text or speechSplit and represent: tokens,embeddingsModel: understand or generateTask: translate, summarize, answer

Example

When your email app suggests the end of a sentence, or a service translates a web page, NLP techniques are at work, turning words into numbers and back into useful text.

Why it matters

Language is how people share most knowledge, so NLP touches search, customer service, accessibility, and education.

Common questions

Is NLP the same as an LLM?

No. LLMs are one modern approach to NLP, which also includes older statistical and rule-based methods.

What tasks does NLP include?

Translation, summarization, sentiment analysis, entity recognition, question answering, and speech recognition.

Why is language hard for computers?

Meaning depends on context, ambiguity, tone, and cultural knowledge.

Related terms

Named Entity Recognition (NER)An NLP task that identifies entities such as people, places, dates, or organizations.AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)A hypothetical AI system that can perform most intellectual tasks at a human level across many domains.AI AlignmentThe work of making AI systems behave according to human intentions, values, and safety constraints.AI SafetyA field focused on reducing harmful behavior, failures, and misuse risks in AI systems.AnnotationHuman-added labels or metadata used to train or evaluate machine learning models.Artificial Intelligence (AI)The broad field of building systems that perform tasks requiring pattern recognition, reasoning, language, or decision-making.

Learn more in our free guides

NLP BasicsEmergent Abilities of Large Language ModelsSycophancy in Language ModelsNaturalSpeech and Latent Diffusion TTS

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NLP Basics QuizEmergent Abilities of Large Language Models QuizSycophancy in Language Models Quiz

See also

Neural NetworkMultimodal ModelNormalizationModel QuantizationOCR (Optical Character Recognition)Model DriftOpen-Source ModelModel Card