What is natural language processing? The business benefits of NLP explained

Natural language processing (NLP) is the branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that deals with communication: How can a computer be programmed to understand, process, and generate language just like a person? While the term originally referred to a system's ability to read, it's since become a colloquialism for all computational linguistics. Subcategories include natural language generation (NLG) -- a computer's ability to create communication of its own -- and natural language understanding (NLU) -- the ability to understand slang, mispronunciations, misspellings, and other variants in language. Natural language processing works through machine learning (ML). Machine learning systems store words and the ways they come together just like any other form of data.