Natural language processing (NLP)

Natural language processing (NLP) is the branch of artificial intelligence ✕ Artificial intelligence is a computer system’s ability to perform tasks we associate with human intelligence, such as understanding language, recognizing images or making decisions. More in the glossary → devoted to having machines understand, interpret and generate human language, both written and spoken. It covers very everyday tasks: translating text, correcting spelling, filtering spam ✕ Spam is unwanted bulk messages, usually by email — often advertising, but sometimes a carrier for phishing or malware. More in the glossary → , analyzing the sentiment of a comment, transcribing speech or answering questions. For decades it was approached with linguistic rules and statistics; today the deep-learning and language-model approach dominates, which has sharply raised the quality of translators and assistants. It is the technology that lets you speak to a device normally and have it respond meaningfully. Almost any tool that "understands" what you write relies on NLP.