Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that focuses on helping computers understand human language as it is spoken and written. NLP enables computers to understand natural language as humans do, using artificial intelligence to take real-world input, process it, and make sense of it in a way a computer can understand. NLP drives computer programs that translate text from one language to another, respond to spoken commands, and summarize large volumes of text rapidly—even in real time. Some of the most common applications of NLP include voice-operated GPS systems, digital assistants, speech-to-text dictation software, customer service chatbots, and other consumer conveniences.

NLP tasks break down human text and voice data in ways that help the computer make sense of what its ingesting. Some of these tasks include:

• Named Entity Recognition (NER): Identifying and categorizing named entities in text into predefined categories such as person names, organizations, locations, medical codes, time expressions, quantities, monetary values, percentages, etc. .

• Sentiment Analysis: Determining the sentiment of a piece of text, whether it is positive, negative, or neutral.

• Text Summarization: Generating a shorter version of a longer text while retaining the most important information.

• Machine Translation: Translating text from one language to another.

NLP is an integral part of everyday life and is becoming more so as language technology is applied to diverse fields like retailing, medicine, and customer service.