Natural language processing (or NLP) is a central aspect of artificial intelligence and machine learning, bridging the gap between human communication and computer understanding. NLP presents a unique challenge: making sense of the vast and complex world of human language. Every tweet, review, or text message we send is a potential data point for NLP systems. By mastering NLP, we enable machines to understand sentiment, extract information, and even generate human-like text. All of these capabilities are driven by NLP. Understanding NLP is like giving our AI models eyes that can read and understand human language.