What is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?
Natural language processing is the field of AI focused on helping computers understand, interpret, and generate human language.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the field of AI that helps computers understand, interpret, and generate human language. It's what lets you search in plain English, translate text, and chat with assistants like ChatGPT.
How It Works:
- Text preprocessing: Clean and split text into tokens
- Representation: Convert words into numbers (embeddings) a model can use
- Modeling: Apply algorithms — increasingly transformers — to capture meaning
- Output: Classify, translate, summarize, or generate new text
Common Tasks:
- Sentiment analysis: Is this review positive or negative?
- Named entity recognition: Find names, places, dates
- Machine translation: Convert between languages
- Summarization: Condense long documents
- Question answering: Extract or generate answers
Why It's Hard:
Human language is ambiguous, context-dependent, and full of idioms and sarcasm. The same word can mean different things ("bank" of a river vs. a money bank), which makes understanding nontrivial.
FAQ
Are large language models the same as NLP?
LLMs are a powerful tool used within NLP. NLP is the broader field; LLMs are one recent, very effective approach to many NLP tasks.
What are embeddings in NLP?
Embeddings turn words or sentences into numeric vectors so that similar meanings end up close together in space, which lets models reason about relationships between words.