Natural Language Processing: Terms Natural language refers to the language that humans use to communicate with each other, such as English, Spanish, or Chinese Processing As distinguished from data processing Question: How is data processing and natural language processing different? Consider the Unix wc program, which counts the total number of bytes, words, and lines in a text file When used to count bytes and lines, wc is an ordinary data processing application However, when it is used to count the words in a file, it requires knowledge about what it means to be a word and thus becomes a language processing system