Natural language processing (NLP) is a way for computers to analyze, understand, and derive meaning from human language. NLP utilizes machine learning to automatically learn rules by analyzing large datasets rather than requiring hand-coding of rules. Common NLP tasks include summarization, translation, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, and speech recognition. NLP works by applying algorithms to identify and extract natural language rules to convert unstructured language into a form computers can understand. Main techniques used in NLP are syntactic analysis to assess language alignment with grammar rules and semantic analysis to understand meaning and interpretation of words.