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What Is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?

Written byre:cinq StaffUpdated 16 Sept 2026

Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of artificial intelligence that gives computers the ability to understand, interpret, and generate human language. Businesses possess vast amounts of text and speech data, from customer emails and support calls to social media comments and reviews. Manually analyzing this unstructured information is slow, expensive, and impossible to do at scale.

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How it helps#

NLP automates the reading and understanding of human language, allowing a business to quickly extract key information, identify customer sentiment, and categorize feedback from thousands of sources at once. This drives faster decision-making, improves operational efficiency, and reveals valuable business insights.

How it works#

At its core, NLP breaks down human sentences into smaller parts, like words and phrases, to analyze grammar, structure, and relationships. It identifies key components such as names, locations, and actions within the text.

Using this structural analysis, machine learning models, which have been trained on massive datasets of text and speech, then work to determine the actual meaning and intent. The system learns patterns, context, and nuances from the training data, enabling it to perform specific tasks like summarizing a document, translating between languages, or identifying the emotion in a customer review.

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