1. Introduction to Natural Language Processing Natural language processing (NLP) is the intersection of computer science, linguistics and machine learning. The field focuses on communication between computers and humans in natural language and NLP is all about making computers understand and generate human language.
Discover how natural language processing can help you to converse more naturally with computers In 1954, IBM demonstrated the ability to translate Russian sentences into English using machine translation on an IBM 701 mainframe. While simple by today's standards, the demonstration identified the massive advantages of language translation.
1960s: Some notably successful natural language processing systems developed in the 1960s were SHRDLU, a natural language system working in restricted "blocks worlds" with restricted vocabularies, and ELIZA, a simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist, written by Joseph Weizenbaum between 1964 and 1966.
Natural language generation is sometimes described as the opposite of speech recognition or speech-to-text; it's the task of putting structured information into human language. See the blog post “ NLP vs. NLU vs. NLG: the differences between three natural language processing concepts ” for a deeper look into how these concepts relate.