Answer
Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of artificial intelligence that focuses on enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language in both spoken and written forms. NLP combines computational linguistics with machine learning and deep learning models to process text or speech and derive meaning. Applications include language translation, sentiment analysis, chatbots, and speech recognition.
Core components NLP systems typically involve tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, and syntactic parsing to break down language structure. These processes allow machines to extract key information from unstructured text.
Machine learning integration Modern NLP relies heavily on neural networks, particularly transformer models like BERT and GPT, which are trained on large text corpora to predict and generate language. These models power virtual assistants and search engines.
Despite advances, NLP still faces challenges with ambiguity, context, and idiomatic expressions in human language.