Natural Language Processing

Natural language processing (NLP) is the field of methods that enable computers to analyze, understand, and generate human language.

Teaching computers to work with ordinary human language—reading, writing, and interpreting text.

NLP spans classical pipelines (tokenization, parsing, NER) and modern neural methods culminating in large pretrained language models.

NLP is the parent discipline for many glossary terms that appear in enterprise language products.

• Search and classification
• Information extraction
• Translation and summarization

• Unlocks unstructured text at scale
• Supports multilingual products

• Ambiguity and context sensitivity
• Domain jargon challenges

• NLP did not begin with ChatGPT; LLMs are a recent peak method

NLP vs LLM?

LLMs are a class of models used inside NLP applications; NLP also includes non-LLM methods still used in production.

• NIST AI RMF

• Jurafsky & Martin — Speech and Language Processing