What is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology allows a computer to understand the main linguistic concepts within a question or solution. Its goal is to design and build Computers that analyze, understand and generate language that humans use naturally.

Natural langu25 February, 2008 the computer in German, English or another human language. Some applications of such interfaces are database queries, information retrieval from texts and so-called expert systems. Current advances in recognition of spoken language improve the usability of many types of natural language systems. Communication with computers using spoken language will have a lasting impact upon the work environment, opening up completely new areas of application for information technology.

Although existing NLP programs are far from achieving human ability, they have numerous possible applications. Even if the language the machine understands and its domain of discourse are very restricted, the use of human language can increase the acceptance of software and the productivity of its users.

An Incomplete list of NLP fields:

• Natural Language Parsing
• Natural Language Understanding
• Natural Language Interfaces
• Natural Language Generation
• Automatic Speech Recognition
• Text to Speech
• Machine Translation
• Grammar Inference
• Information Retrieval
• Text Summarize
• Document Classification
• Information Extraction