What is NLP (Natural Language Processing)?
NLP (Natural Language Processing) — The branch of AI concerned with giving computers the ability to understand and interpret human language.
NLP enables machines to read, understand, and generate human language. It powers chatbots, sentiment analysis, document summarization, translation, and search. Modern NLP is dominated by transformer-based models, which dramatically outperform older statistical approaches.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the most common NLP use cases in business?
Customer support chatbots, email classification, document summarization, sentiment analysis of reviews, contract analysis, and multilingual content translation.
Has NLP improved recently?
Dramatically. LLMs have made NLP accessible without specialized training. Tasks that required custom models and linguists in 2020 can now be done with a simple API call to a general-purpose LLM.
Do I need labeled data for NLP tasks?
Not always. LLMs can perform many NLP tasks zero-shot. For specialized domains or when accuracy is critical, labeled data for fine-tuning still provides meaningful improvements.