There is a big difference between the way humans communicate with one another, and the way we “talk” with computers. When writing programs, we have to use very careful syntax and structure, but when talking with other people, we take a lot of liberties. We make short sentences. We make longer sentences, we layer in extra meaning, we use puns and sarcasms. We find multiple ways to say the same thing.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an area of research and application that explores how computers can be used to understand and manipulate natural language text or speech. NLP is a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that is focused on enabling computers to understand and process human languages, and to get computers closer to a human-level understanding of language.