NLP
Also called Natural Language Processing
The field of teaching computers to understand, generate, and work with human language — the discipline behind chatbots, translators, and search.
Think of it like
Teaching a computer to read and write, not just process data.
Example
Spam filtering, autocomplete, translation, and chatbots are all NLP applications.
How it actually works
NLP existed long before ChatGPT — decades of work on parsing, sentiment analysis, machine translation, and named-entity recognition. The transformer/LLM era collapsed many separate NLP tasks into "just prompt the model," but the field's core questions remain as relevant as ever.
For product teams
The field behind every text AI feature — useful context for understanding what LLMs replaced and improved.
For engineers
Computational linguistics; pre-LLM: feature engineering + task-specific models; post-LLM: prompt-based.
Related
- LLM — Large language models are the current NLP powerhouse.
- Transformer — The transformer revolutionized the field.
- BERT — Pre-LLM NLP used techniques like BERT.
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