What is NLP (Natural Language Processing)?

NLP (Natural Language Processing) is the branch of AI focused on helping computers read, understand, generate, and interact using human language.

What can NLP do?

Understanding (NLU)

• Text classification (spam? sentiment? topic?)
• Named Entity Recognition (find names of people, places, companies)
• Question Answering
• Summarization

Generation (NLG)

• Writing articles, emails, code (LLMs)
• Machine translation
• Image captioning
• Text-to-Speech

Bridges

• Speech-to-Text (Whisper)
• OCR (reading text from images)

A short history

Era	Characteristics	Examples
1960-1990	Rule-based	ELIZA chatbot, hand-coded translation
1990-2010	Statistical NLP	Early Google Translate
2010-2017	Word embeddings (Word2Vec, GloVe), RNN/LSTM	Translation improved significantly
2017-now	Transformer	BERT, GPT, Claude

The big bang came in 2017 with the paper “Attention Is All You Need” — the Transformer architecture changed everything.

How are NLP and LLM different?

• NLP is the entire FIELD — every way machines process language
• LLM is a TYPE OF MODEL within NLP — currently the dominant one

Modern LLMs “swallow” most traditional NLP tasks:

• Sentiment analysis? → Ask the LLM “positive or negative?”
• NER? → “List the names of people in this passage”
• Translation? → “Translate to X”

→ Many classic NLP tasks now just need a prompt to an LLM, no specialized model required.

NLP for Vietnamese

Vietnamese has some tricky characteristics:

• Word segmentation: is “học sinh” one word or two? — the machine has to know
• Tone marks: “ma/má/mà/mả/mã/mạ” all mean completely different things
• Tokenization: takes 1.5-2× more tokens than English

Vietnamese-specific resources:

• VnCoreNLP — a classic toolkit
• PhoBERT — BERT pretrained on Vietnamese
• Vinai/PhoGPT — a Vietnamese LLM
• Llama 3.x, Claude, GPT-5: support Vietnamese fairly well, though it’s not their native focus

Common NLP applications in Vietnam

• Customer-service chatbots for banks and insurance
• Social media sentiment analysis
• OCR for ID cards, contracts, invoices
• Automatic email categorization
• Internal semantic search

Related

• LLM
• Transformer
• AI