Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence that focuses on enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language in a meaningful and useful way.

Core NLP tasks include:

• Text Analysis: Tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, parsing
• Language Understanding: Sentiment analysis, intent recognition, entity extraction
• Language Generation: Text summarization, translation, content creation
• Conversational AI: Chatbots, virtual assistants, dialogue systems
• Information Extraction: Named entity recognition, relationship extraction

Modern NLP leverages deep learning techniques, particularly transformer architectures like BERT and GPT, to achieve human-level performance on many language tasks. Applications include machine translation, search engines, content moderation, and automated customer service.