Natural language processing (NLP): definition

Natural language processing is the field of AI concerned with letting computers understand, interpret, and generate human language.

NLP is everything to do with machines and human language: understanding a question, pulling meaning from a document, translating, summarising, or writing a reply. Large language models are the current, dramatic high point of decades of NLP work.

For a business, NLP is what makes support assistants, document reading, and search-by-meaning possible. When people say "the AI understood what I meant," NLP is the part doing it.

Related terms

Large language model (LLM): A large language model is a neural network trained on huge amounts of text to predict the next token, which lets it write, summarise, classify, and answer questions across almost any topic.
Semantic search: Semantic search finds results by meaning rather than exact keywords, so a search for "cancel my plan" surfaces the "how to end your subscription" page even though they share no words.
Multimodal AI: Multimodal AI is a model that can take in or produce more than one kind of data, such as text plus images, audio, or video, rather than text alone.