Natural language processing (NLP)
The branch of AI focused on understanding, generating, and transforming human language with computers, from parsing and translation to modern LLMs.
Natural language processing (NLP) is the part of AI and machine learning that works with text and speech: tokenization, parsing, translation, summarization, question answering, and generation.
Classic pipelines used rules and statistical models; ELIZA (1966) was an early rule-based dialogue system. Today’s stack often centers on transformers, LLMs, and tokens. Product-facing NLP shows up in chatbots, search, and RAG systems shaped by prompts. Supervised learning on labeled text remains common before deployment at inference time.