Natural language refers to any language that occurs naturally in a human community through a process of use, repetition, and change without conscious planning or premeditation. It can take the form of spoken language or sign language. Natural languages are distinguished from constructed and formal languages, such as those used to program computers or to study logic. Examples of natural languages include English, Standard Mandarin, and other languages spoken by human communities.
In the context of computer science and artificial intelligence, natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield primarily concerned with giving computers the ability to understand and manipulate human language. NLP involves processing natural language datasets, such as text corpora or speech corpora, using rule-based or probabilistic machine learning approaches. The goal is to enable computers to "understand" the contents of documents, extract information and insights, and categorize and organize documents themselves. NLP tasks include speech recognition, natural-language understanding, and natural-language generation. NLP has a variety of real-world applications in fields such as medical research, search engines, business intelligence, and more.
