Natural language processing, or NLP, is the field of getting computers to work with human language, such as text people type or say.
In plain words
NLP covers any task where a computer reads, understands or produces human language: translation, sorting emails, answering questions and chatbots. It can use hand-written language rules, but today almost all of it runs on machine learning, and large transformer models have pushed it forward.
A quick example
When your email app files a message under "Promotions", suggests a short reply, or translates a note from a colleague, each of those is a natural language processing task.
Where you'll meet it
- Chatbots, search and translation.
- Sorting, summarising and tagging text.
Related
Sources
- Docsnatural language processing, Google Machine Learning Glossary · read 29 Sept 2026
- PaperMegatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism, Shoeybi et al. (arXiv) · read 29 Sept 2026
Checked by WhatIsAI against the sources above · 29 Sept 2026. Spotted an error? Report it.