Introduction to Natural Language Processing
Introduction to Natural Language Processing Natural language processing (NLP) helps computers understand, interpret, and generate human language. It is a practical field that touches many everyday apps, from search engines to chat helpers and translation tools. NLP turns language data into insights the computer can work with. At its core, NLP treats language as data. The work often starts with tokenization, splitting text into words or symbols. Then comes normalization, which standardizes capitalization and punctuation. Higher layers handle grammar (syntax), meaning (semantics), and context (who is talking to whom). For example, the sentence “She reads books” can be analyzed for tense and subject, while “What is your name?” is a question a system should handle gracefully. Languages with different scripts or word orders need special care, too. ...