AI Chatbot Terms > 1 min read

Natural Language Understanding: How AI Comprehends Human Language

Learn how NLU enables AI to interpret human language, extract meaning, and understand intent for accurate chatbot responses.

More about Natural Language Understanding (NLU)

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a subset of NLP focused on enabling machines to comprehend human language—not just process words, but understand meaning, intent, entities, and context. NLU bridges the gap between raw text and actionable understanding.

In AI chatbots, NLU powers intent classification, entity extraction, sentiment analysis, and contextual understanding. Strong NLU is essential for chatbots that need to accurately interpret user requests.

Frequently Asked Questions

NLP is the broader field covering all language processing tasks. NLU specifically focuses on understanding meaning and intent, which is a subset of NLP.

NLU systems use context, probability, and sometimes clarifying questions to resolve ambiguity. Large language models are particularly good at handling ambiguous inputs.

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