Natural Language Processing is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It’s an umbrella term that’s used to refer to the ability of machines to process and understand language as it’s written or spoken by human beings. While it would be nice to think that our languages make logical sense and follow basic rules of grammar and punctuation, we all know that’s not always the case. We use slang, proper nouns, abbreviations and acronyms, and not everyone can string a sentence together like Stephen King or J. K. Rowling.