Natural Language Processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is a particular interdisciplinary field between linguistics, computer science and artificial intelligence that denotes a body of methods with the scope of analyzing and processing human languages data and information. Natural language processing is particular and distinctive from other statistical and computational methods in the sense that it transforms data that is essentially non-mathematic into mathematical data. In certain ways, NLP is closer to human-machine interactions than any other type of data-driven or computationally driven method. While we can loosely think about the emergence of writing as a major form of preserving human culture across generations and extending the collective memory in ways that no other cultural species has been able to, we can loosely think about NLP as a way for human culture to interact with a non-biological. technological culture. While the algorithms are not there yet, we can think of NLP as a pathaway for extending our human collective memory and culture into a purely technological one. NLP can also help us better understand the more general process of communication.
"English is the Lingua Franca par excellence!" (SELF-ANNIHILATING SENTENCES - Saul Gorn's Compendium Of Rarely Used Cliches, 1985)