NLP (Natural Language Processing)

A branch of AI that helps computers understand, interpret, and manipulate human language.

How it works

NLP encompasses a range of tasks at different levels of linguistic analysis. Tokenisation splits text into tokens; part-of-speech tagging labels each token's grammatical role; named entity recognition identifies people, places, and organisations; sentiment analysis classifies emotional tone; machine translation converts between languages; and question answering extracts or generates answers. Modern NLP uses large pre-trained Transformer models fine-tuned for each specific task, often outperforming humans on standard benchmarks.

Why it matters

Language is humanity's primary information medium. The ability to process it automatically unlocks enormous value: automated customer support, real-time translation, document summarisation, legal contract analysis, and medical record processing. NLP powers the interfaces that make AI accessible to non-technical users — if AI can understand and generate natural language, any person can interact with it without learning a programming language or formal query syntax.