Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics focused on enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language. It involves techniques for processing and analyzing unstructured text or speech data to extract meaning, identify patterns, and perform language-related tasks. NLP combines linguistics, computer science, and machine learning to bridge the gap between human communication and machine understanding.
Developers should learn NLP when building applications that involve text analysis, chatbots, sentiment analysis, machine translation, or information extraction from documents. It's essential for creating intelligent systems that can process customer feedback, automate content moderation, or enable voice-activated interfaces. NLP skills are particularly valuable in industries like healthcare (clinical note analysis), finance (sentiment-based trading), and customer service (automated support systems).