7.1 Natural Language Processing (NLP)
NLP is AI that works with human language - reading, understanding, translating and writing text.
Chapter 7: Major Areas of AI
Natural Language Processing is the branch of AI focused on human language. Human language is messy: slang, sarcasm, typos, words with five meanings. NLP is how machines deal with all that.
Classic NLP tasks include sentiment analysis (is this review positive or negative?), translation, summarisation, named entity recognition (spotting names, places, dates) and question answering.
Modern NLP is mostly powered by LLMs. The typical pipeline: split text into tokens, turn tokens into numbers (embeddings), process them with a model, and output a label or new text.
Key takeaways
NLP = AI for human language
Tasks: sentiment, translation, summaries, Q&A
Pipeline: tokens → numbers → model → output