NLP
Natural Language Processing
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
NLP is the branch of AI that deals with human language — reading it, writing it, translating it, summarizing it. Before LLMs, NLP involved a lot of hand-crafted rules and painful feature engineering. Now you just prompt Claude. The whole field changed overnight. NLP is why chatbots stopped being terrible.
Real Talk
Natural Language Processing is the subfield of AI concerned with enabling computers to understand, generate, and manipulate human language. Core NLP tasks include tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, machine translation, and text generation. LLMs have superseded most classical NLP methods.
When You'll Hear This
"We need NLP to extract entities from the customer emails." / "The LLM revolution basically ate classical NLP."
Related Terms
Embedding
An embedding is turning words, sentences, or entire documents into lists of numbers (vectors) that capture their meaning.
LLM (Large Language Model)
An LLM is a humongous AI that read basically the entire internet and learned to predict what words come next, really really well.
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
The full name for NLP — making computers understand and produce human language.
Tokenizer
A tokenizer chops text into pieces that the AI model can understand — but not in ways humans would expect.
Transformer
The Transformer is THE architecture behind all modern AI. ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney, Whisper — all transformers under the hood. The key innovation?