Natural language processing (NLP) is the branch of artificial intelligence focused on giving computers the ability to work with human language: understanding what a piece of text or speech means, extracting information from it, and generating language in response. It sits underneath most of the AI tools people interact with directly, including voice assistants, translation apps, spell-checkers, and chatbots.
Modern NLP relies heavily on large language models trained on vast amounts of text, which learn statistical patterns in how words and sentences fit together well enough to handle tasks like summarization, sentiment analysis, and open-ended conversation. Earlier NLP systems relied more on hand-written grammar rules and smaller statistical models, which handled narrower tasks reliably but struggled with the ambiguity and context-dependence that make human language genuinely hard for a machine to parse.
