Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and linguistics that focuses on giving computers the ability to understand, interpret, and manipulate human language. NLP is used in a wide variety of everyday products and services, such as voice-activated digital assistants on smartphones, email-scanning programs used to identify spam, and translation apps that decipher foreign languages. Some of the common tasks involved in NLP include:
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Speech recognition: The ability of a computer program to recognize and transcribe spoken language into text.
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Natural language understanding: The ability of a computer program to understand the meaning of text or speech in context.
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Natural language generation: The ability of a computer program to generate human-like language in response to a given input.
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Text and speech processing: This involves tasks such as optical character recognition (OCR), which involves determining the corresponding text from an image representing printed text, and part-of-speech tagging, which involves tagging words in a sentence with their corresponding part of speech.
NLP has gained numerous real-world applications, including chatbots, cybersecurity, search engines, and big data analytics. Although NLP tasks are closely intertwined, they can be subdivided into categories for convenience.
