Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of AI focused on enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language.
NLP covers a wide range of tasks: detecting the language of a document, extracting named entities, summarizing text, translating between languages, classifying sentiment, and generating responses. Large language models are a recent and prominent application of NLP.
NLP systems work with statistical patterns in language, not with meaning in the way humans understand it.