Natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence that helps computers understand, interpret, and manipulate human language. NLP involves reading and understanding spoken or written language through computational linguistics techniques like named entity recognition, tokenization, stemming, lemmatization, and sentiment analysis. Python is well-suited for NLP due to its simple syntax and rich text processing tools. NLP has close ties to artificial intelligence and aims to bridge the gap between human communication and computer understanding.