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AI glossary

Natural Language Processing

Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of artificial intelligence focused on helping computers understand, interpret, and generate human language.

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In this guide

  1. 1What Natural Language Processing means
  2. 2Why Natural Language Processing matters

What Natural Language Processing means

Human language is full of nuance, context, and ambiguity, which makes it hard for computers. Natural language processing is the area of AI that tackles this - turning messy text and speech into something a computer can work with.

It is at work whenever your phone suggests the next word in a message, a tool summarizes a long article, or a chatbot understands a question you typed in your own words rather than in a fixed command.

Why Natural Language Processing matters

NLP is the field behind every AI tool that reads or writes text, which is most of the tools you will use. Knowing the term helps you understand what those tools are really doing.

NLP powers chatbots, writing tools, and language models
It is behind common tasks like summarizing and translating
Understanding it clarifies how text-based AI tools work
Most no-code AI automations rely on NLP under the hood

Frequently asked questions

Large language models are currently the most powerful approach to natural language processing. NLP is the broad field; LLMs are the leading technology now used to solve its problems.

More AI terms

Training DataThe collection of examples an AI model learns from in order to perform a task.Fine-TuningFurther training an existing AI model on extra, focused examples so it performs better on a specific task.Foundation ModelA large, general-purpose AI model trained on broad data that can be adapted for many different tasks.TransformerA type of neural network design that powers modern language models and handles sequences like text well.InferenceThe stage where a trained AI model is actually used to produce an answer or result from new input.GPTA family of large language models - GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer.

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