Editing Natural language understanding (section)

{{Short description|Subtopic of natural language processing in artificial intelligence}}
{{hatnote|This article is about the computer processing ability. For the psychological concept, see [[Language processing in the brain]]}}
{{Update|date=February 2024|reason=lack of discussion of recent developments related to [[large language models]], but also no mention of older techniques like [[word embedding]] or [[word2vec]]}}

'''Natural language understanding''' ('''NLU''') or '''natural language interpretation''' ('''NLI''')<ref>Semaan, P. (2012). [http://www.lacsc.org/papers/PaperA6.pdf Natural Language Generation: An Overview]. Journal of Computer Science & Research (JCSCR)-ISSN, 50-57</ref> is a subset of [[natural language processing]] in [[artificial intelligence]] that deals with machine [[reading comprehension]]. NLU has been considered an [[AI-hard]] problem.<ref>Roman V. Yampolskiy. Turing Test as a Defining Feature of AI-Completeness . In Artificial Intelligence, Evolutionary Computation and Metaheuristics (AIECM) --In the footsteps of Alan Turing. Xin-She Yang (Ed.). pp. 3-17. (Chapter 1). Springer, London. 2013. http://cecs.louisville.edu/ry/TuringTestasaDefiningFeature04270003.pdf</ref>

There is considerable commercial interest in the field because of its application to [[automated reasoning]],<ref>Van Harmelen, Frank, Vladimir Lifschitz, and Bruce Porter, eds. [https://books.google.com/books?id=xwBDylHhJhYC&q=%22natural+language+understanding%22 Handbook of knowledge representation]. Vol. 1. Elsevier, 2008.</ref> [[machine translation]],<ref>Macherey, Klaus, Franz Josef Och, and Hermann Ney. "[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Klaus_Macherey/publication/2371092_Natural_Language_Understanding_Using_Statistical_Machine_Translation/links/00463523b62bc9b5e6000000/Natural-Language-Understanding-Using-Statistical-Machine-Translation.pdf Natural language understanding using statistical machine translation]." Seventh European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology. 2001.</ref> [[question answering]],<ref>Hirschman, Lynette, and Robert Gaizauskas. "[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rob_Gaizauskas/publication/231807195_Natural_Language_Question_Answering_The_View_from_Here/links/0c96052a09fa7b819e000000/Natural-Language-Question-Answering-The-View-from-Here.pdf Natural language question answering: the view from here]." natural language engineering 7.4 (2001): 275-300.</ref> news-gathering, [[text categorization]], [[Voice user interface|voice-activation]], archiving, and large-scale [[content analysis]].