Natural Language Processing (NLP)
The field concerned with machines understanding human language.
Technical Term
Full explanation
Natural Language Processing, or NLP, is the field of AI concerned with how machines understand, interpret, and generate human language.
NLP predates today's generative AI systems by decades and covers a wide range of tasks: parsing grammar, recognizing named entities in text, classifying sentiment, translating between languages, and summarizing documents are all NLP tasks, whether or not a large language model is involved.
The large language models behind modern AI search are, in effect, a single very large NLP system that folds many of these older, separate tasks into one model. Understanding NLP as the older field underneath explains why terms like entity and semantic search show up throughout AI search even though they were not invented for it.
Why this matters
It is the older discipline underneath today's systems, and it is where entity recognition and semantic understanding come from.
Example
Long before generative AI chat products existed, NLP techniques were what let a search engine recognize that a query mentioning a founder's name and a page mentioning "the founder of" a company might be talking about the same entity. That same underlying capability, entity recognition, is still doing work inside today's AI answers.
Where this sits
Natural Language Processing (NLP) belongs to AI & Search Infrastructure, one of the seven layers of the Aingworth Glossary. The technical vocabulary behind the interfaces. Useful for understanding how the systems work, without becoming the center of the conversation.
Related terms
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