Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of artificial intelligence that enables computers to understand and generate human language. There are two main components of NLP: natural language generation and natural language understanding. Natural language generation transforms structured data into written text, while natural language understanding takes sentences as input and applies the appropriate action by drawing on different levels of linguistic knowledge, including phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and world knowledge. NLP provides benefits such as minimizing human intervention through automation, making interaction with machines easier, and enabling smarter management of business operations through activities like report generation and monitoring.