Improved quality of information. NLP shares some basic notions with IR, but NLP is not a subfield of IR. "Understanding" the contents of documents refers to one of the many tasks of NLP, i.e. Natural Language Understanding (NLU). NLP and NLU are distinct, as NLP has many other applications.
{{Short description|Field of linguistics and computer science}}{{More citations needed|date=May 2024}}{{Other uses|NLP (disambiguation){{!}}NLP}}{{About|natural language processing done by computers|the natural language processing done by the human brain|Language processing in the brain}}
'''Natural language processing''' ('''NLP''') is an [[interdisciplinary]] subfield of [[computer science]] and- specifically [[informationArtificial retrievalIntelligence]] - and [[linguistics]]. It is primarily concerned with givingproviding computers the ability to supportprocess anddata manipulateencoded human language. It involves processingin [[natural language]] datasets, suchtypically ascollected in [[text corpus|text corpora]] or speech corpora, using either rule-based or probabilistic (i.e., statistical and, most recently,or neural network-based) [[machine learning]] approaches. The goal is a computer capable of "understanding"{{Citation needed|reason=Clarification needed. Why is term in quotation marks?|date=March 2024}} the contents of documents, including the [[contextmachine (language use)|contextuallearning]] nuances of the language within them. To this end, natural language processing often borrows ideas fromand [[theoreticaldeep linguisticslearning]]. The technology can then accurately extract information and insights contained in the documents as well as categorize and organize the documents themselves.
ChallengesMajor tasks in naturalNatural languageLanguage processingProcessing frequently involveare [[speech recognition]], [[text classification]], [[natural-language understanding]], and [[natural language generation|natural-language generation]].
