What does the acronym NLP mean in artificial intelligence?

In artificial intelligence, NLP means natural language processing, the field concerned with computers working with human language.

NLP includes tasks such as translating text, recognizing speech, answering questions, summarizing documents, and identifying sentiment. Systems may process written language, spoken language, or both. Modern applications often use machine-learning models trained on very large collections of text and audio.

The field combines ideas from computer science, linguistics, statistics, and information theory. Earlier systems commonly relied on hand-written grammars and rules, while later systems used statistical methods and neural networks. Transformer-based models greatly expanded the capabilities of language software after 2017.

NLP is sometimes confused with natural-language understanding, which is a narrower term focused on interpreting meaning. Language generation is another related area: it produces text, whereas NLP as a broad field includes both understanding and generation.