What is NLP?
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the branch of AI focused on enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language. It bridges the gap between human communication and computer understanding.
Core NLP Tasks
Tokenization: Breaking text into individual words or subwords that a model can process.
Sentiment Analysis: Determining whether text expresses positive, negative, or neutral sentiment.
Named Entity Recognition: Identifying people, places, organizations, and dates in text.
Machine Translation: Converting text from one language to another (e.g., Google Translate).
Text Summarization: Condensing long documents into shorter summaries while preserving key information.
The Transformer Revolution
Before 2017, NLP relied on recurrent networks that processed words one at a time. The Transformer architecture introduced "attention" — the ability to consider all words simultaneously and weigh their relationships. This breakthrough led directly to models like BERT, GPT, and all modern LLMs.
Modern Applications
NLP powers chatbots, voice assistants, email autocomplete, content moderation, legal document analysis, and code generation tools like GitHub Copilot.