Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a sub-field of Computer Science and Linguistics concerned with allowing computers to automatically analyse and interpret natural language (e.g. text written in English or Mandarin) and produce meaningful outputs in response.
Whilst many of the fundamentals of NLP come from philosophers and linguists who predate the modern information era, the modern discipline is thought to have started in the 1940s and 1950s with the publication of seminal works by Turing, Chomsky and the Georgetown Experiment.
Applications of NLP
Most applications of NLP fall into two broad groups of use cases Artificial intelligence_ a modern approach: 1. The facilitation of communication between computers and humans (e.g. chatbots) or two sets of humans (e.g. automatic translation tools). 2. Knowledge acquisition and information extraction in which we aim to summarize, search, categorise or score text en masse in order to identify patterns and signals such as named entities.