A quick introduction to NLP

Natural Language Processing or NLP is an area of Data Science, Machine Learning and Linguistics which focuses on processing the language that people speak. NLP used to be one of the slowest developing areas. When Computer Vision has been using fancy neural networks since the dawn of AlexNet, NLP was lagging behind. In recent years the area is starting to get closer and closer to the development speed of CV. You might have heard about the Transformer, BERT, XLnet, and Ernie. What is NLP overall, how do machines understand our speech, and do they?