Natural Language Processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of artificial intelligence focused on enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language, especially unstructured text and speech. It covers tasks such as classification, extracting information, translation, summarization, and answering questions, and it underpins modern chat assistants.
Early NLP relied on hand-written rules and statistical methods. Neural approaches followed, including recurrent networks such as long short-term memory (LSTM) models, and then transformer-based architectures that power today's large language models. The focus has expanded from analyzing existing text to generating new text.
In manufacturing, NLP can sort maintenance work orders by failure type, pull part numbers and defect descriptions out of free-text quality reports, or let a technician search equipment manuals by asking a question in plain language.
NLP is the broad field; a large language model is one technology within it. Many NLP tasks, such as sentiment scoring or keyword extraction, can be done with smaller, specialized models.