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Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Before we dive into advanced models like Transformers, let’s first understand what Natural Language Processing (NLP) is and why it matters.

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What is NLP?

NLP is a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that helps computers understand and process human language, just like we do. Instead of just recognizing words, NLP tries to understand the meaning behind them.

Here are some common things NLP can do:

- Understanding Sentences – Example: Checking if a movie review is positive or negative, detecting spam emails, or finding out if two sentences mean the same thing.
- Understanding Words in a Sentence – Example: Recognizing nouns (people, places, things) and verbs (actions) or identifying names of people, locations, and companies in a text.
- Generating Text – Example: Auto-suggesting the next word while typing, filling in missing words in a sentence, or writing entire paragraphs based on a short prompt.
- Answering Questions from a Text – Example: You ask, “Who is the president of the USA?” and an NLP system reads an article and gives you the answer.
- Creating New Sentences from Existing Text – Example: Translating a sentence into another language or summarizing a long article into a few key points.

NLP is not just for written text. It is also used for voice assistants (like Siri and Alexa), speech-to-text transcription, and even describing images in words.

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Why is NLP Difficult?

Humans understand language naturally, but computers don’t. For example:

- If someone says, “I’m hungry,” we immediately know they want food.
- We also understand that “I’m hungry” and “I’m sad” have different meanings.

However, for a computer, all it sees is a string of words. It doesn’t automatically understand meaning, tone, or context. To make computers understand language better, researchers have developed special techniques to process text in a way that AI can learn from it.

In the next chapter, we’ll look at how NLP models work and how they have evolved to better understand human language!

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