Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI) that focuses on the interaction between computers and humans using natural language. The ultimate goal of NLP is to enable machines to understand, interpret, and generate human-like language in a way that is both meaningful and contextually relevant.

NLP involves a combination of linguistic, statistical, and machine learning techniques to achieve these tasks. Techniques such as deep learning, neural networks, and pre-trained language models (like BERT, GPT, etc.) have significantly advanced the capabilities of NLP systems in recent years.