7.3 NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
Natural language processing(NLP) is an important component of text mining and is a subfield of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics.
It studies the problem of “understanding” the natural human language, with the view of converting depictions of human language (such as textual documents) into more formal representations (in the form of numeric and symbolic data) that are easier for computer programs to manipulate.
The goal of NLP is to move beyond syntax-driven text manipulation (which is often called “word counting”) to a true understanding and processing of natural language that considers grammatical and semantic constraints as well as the context.