What is Natural Language Processing?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a branch of AI that enables computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language. NLP combines computational linguistics with machine learning to process text and speech in ways that capture meaning, sentiment, and intent.

For SMEs, NLP powers practical applications like chatbots that handle customer inquiries, sentiment analysis tools that monitor brand reputation, automated email classification, voice-to-text transcription, and intelligent document search. These capabilities help businesses improve customer service, gain insights from unstructured data, and automate communication-heavy processes.

NLP systems perform various tasks including tokenization (breaking text into words), named entity recognition (identifying people, places, organizations), sentiment analysis (determining emotional tone), language translation, text summarization, and question answering. Modern NLP models like BERT and GPT have achieved near-human performance on many language tasks.

The business value of NLP lies in its ability to process large volumes of text data quickly and consistently. SMEs can use NLP to analyze customer feedback at scale, automate responses to common inquiries, extract key information from contracts and documents, and provide multilingual support without hiring additional staff. Cloud-based NLP APIs from providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft make these capabilities accessible without requiring specialized expertise.