What is Natural Language Processing?

A branch of artificial intelligence, natural language processing (NLP) deals with making human language (in both written and spoken forms) comprehensible to computers. As a scientific discipline, NLP involves tasks such as identifying sentence structures and boundaries in documents, detecting key words or phrases in audio recordings, extracting relationships between documents, and uncovering meaning in informal or slang speech patterns. NLP can make it possible to analyze and recognize patterns in verbal data that is currently unstructured.

NLP holds a key for enabling major advancements in text analytics and for garnering deeper and potentially more powerful insights from social media data streams, where slang and unconventional language are prevalent.