Created by: Ashraf Mohamed - Sheridan College
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field of artificial intelligence that focuses on the interaction between computers and human language. It enables machines to understand, interpret, and generate human language in a way that is both meaningful and useful. From virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa to real-time translation and sentiment analysis, NLP powers many of the tools we use daily to communicate with technology.
NLP allows computers to perform tasks that involve language, such as:
Translating languages (e.g., Google Translate)
Voice recognition (e.g., Siri, Alexa)
Text prediction and autocompletion
Sentiment analysis (e.g., analyzing customer reviews)
Chatbots and virtual assistants
Document summarization
By enabling machines to understand and respond to language like humans, NLP transforms how we interact with technology — from search engines and emails to healthcare and legal services.
NLP systems often combine:
Linguistic rules (grammar, syntax)
Machine learning algorithms (to learn patterns from data)
Deep learning (especially for understanding context and meaning)
Tasks like tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, and language modeling are fundamental to NLP systems.