What is natural language processing?

Human language is ambiguous, context-dependent, and full of exceptions, which makes it a genuinely hard problem for computers compared to structured data like numbers in a spreadsheet.

Common NLP tasks

• Machine translation — translating text between languages
• Sentiment analysis — determining whether text expresses a positive, negative, or neutral opinion
• Named entity recognition — identifying names of people, places, and organizations in text
• Text generation and summarization — producing new text or condensing longer text
• Speech recognition — converting spoken audio into text

Modern NLP is dominated by transformer-based large language models, which are trained on massive amounts of text and can handle many of these tasks through a single, general-purpose model rather than needing a separate specialized system for each one.