Generative AI & the senses
Natural language processing (NLP) is the branch of AI focused on letting computers read, understand, and produce human language like English or Hindi.
Human language is messy: words have many meanings, grammar bends, and context changes everything. NLP is the effort to handle all that with software. It covers translation, spell checking, spam filtering, summarizing, sentiment analysis, voice assistants, and the chatbots you talk to.
For decades NLP relied on hand-written grammar rules and word statistics. Results were brittle. Then neural networks and, from 2017, transformers changed the field. Models trained on vast amounts of text learned language patterns on their own. Large language models are now the main tool for almost every NLP task.
'Natural' language means human language, as opposed to programming languages. Speech recognition, turning sound into text, is usually treated as a neighboring field; NLP takes over once the words are on the page.
When a review site automatically tags 'the food was cold and the waiter vanished' as a negative review, that is NLP doing sentiment analysis.