3. What is Natural Language Processing (NLP) and what are its applications?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field of artificial intelligence that deals with the interaction between computers and human language. NLP combines computational linguistics with machine learning and deep learning technologies.

Main applications of NLP:

1. Sentiment analysis: Evaluating the emotions expressed in text, such as customer reviews.
2. Machine translation: Automatically translating text from one language to another.
3. Chatbots and virtual assistants: Creating interactive conversational agents like Siri or Alexa.
4. Speech recognition: Converting speech into text.
5. Information retrieval: Improving search results and extracting relevant information from large datasets.
6. Text analysis: Document classification, key information extraction, and topic modeling.

NLP is a crucial tool in many modern applications, enabling computers to better understand and process human language.