What is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?

Natural Language Processing

"Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the study and application of techniques and tools that enable computers to process, analyze, interpret, and reason about human language." Thus, said differently, Natural Language Processing is the study of how computers can read, understand, and reason about human language.

This is important as patterns must be extracted from the thousands of words that are used to create a document. Yet, it is difficult as there are few rules that help with the interpretation of  language as the same set of words can mean different things depending on the context.

Today's machines can "learn" to understand text and spoken words and then respond like people would respond.  An example is Amazon's Alexa. Consider the following questions:

• What is the temperature today?
• How hot is it outside?
• What's the temp?

All of these questions are variations of the same question that the AI is likely to respond to with the same correct answer: "It is 86 degrees Fahrenheit outside now."