What Is NLP (natural language processing)

Last updated: February 8, 2026Reviewed date: February 8, 2026Reading time: 7 min read

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Article Summary

From conversational chatbots on sales pages to the AI assistants on our smartphones, natural language processing (NLP) is revolutionizing the way we humans interact with machines. Google Cloud Natural Language API exposes a suite of powerful, out-of-the-box NLP features that businesses can leverage within their applications without having to create their own training data sets. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at NLP,...

Key Takeaways

This article explains What is natural language processing? in simple medical language.
This article explains What are the benefits of NLP for your business? in simple medical language.
This article explains What is Google Cloud Natural Language API? in simple medical language.
This article explains Google Cloud Natural Language API features in simple medical language.

Educational health guideWritten for patient understanding and clinical awareness.

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Emergency safety firstUrgent warning signs are highlighted below.

Seek urgent medical care if you notice

These warning signs are general safety guidance. Local emergency numbers and clinical judgment should always come first.

Severe symptoms, breathing difficulty, fainting, confusion, or rapidly worsening illness.
New weakness, severe pain, high fever, or symptoms after a serious injury.
Any symptom that feels urgent, unusual, or unsafe for the patient.

Emergency now

Use emergency care for severe, sudden, rapidly worsening, or life-threatening symptoms.

See a doctor

Book a professional medical evaluation if symptoms persist, worsen, recur often, affect daily activities, or occur in a high-risk patient.

Learn safely

Use this article to understand possible causes, tests, treatment options, prevention, and questions to ask your clinician.

What is natural language processing?

Natural language processing (NLP) is the use of a computer program to process speech and language data. NLP is related to computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. It is used in applications such as online assistants, automatic question-answering systems, machine translation, speech recognition, speech synthesis, and information retrieval. It can be used to intelligently filter comments across social media for spam or add speech-to-text functionality to your apps. It can even be used to authorize bank transactions via voice authentication. These are just a handful of examples of how NLP brings natural language understanding to software applications.

What are the benefits of NLP for your business?

NLP is more than just a technology buzzword, it can bring real value to your business in a myriad of ways. Examples of ways Google Cloud Natural Language API can help your business include:

Leveraging sentiment analysis within your chat and email clients to track customer satisfaction over time.
Using entity sentiment analysis to track approval ratings of executives across social media and news.
Extracting data from text information scraped from the web to assist with market research.
Analyzing language used by a target market to help craft better marketing messages
Identifying trends in your industry across social media channels.

What is Google Cloud Natural Language API?

Google Cloud Natural Language API lets you leverage machine learning models pre-trained by Google to perform various NLP tasks, including sentiment analysis, entity extraction, and content classification. The Natural Language API gives businesses access to the same deep learning technologies behind Google Search’s ability to answer specific user questions and the language-understanding system behind Google Assistant. With Natural Language API, you can create your NLP-powered apps without having to deal with the costs and overhead of storing and managing your own training data sets.

Google Cloud Natural Language API features

Google Cloud Natural Language API boasts several features that let you make the most of unstructured language data. Like any REST API, it gives you the ability to make JSON requests and responses to manipulate plain text. Let’s take a look at some of the things you can do with this powerful API.

Sentiment analysis

Read an online product review, and you’ll instantly be able to tell whether that review was positive, neutral, or negative, just from the tone of the customer’s written voice. Sentiment analysis is the NLP analog of this human ability to judge the tone of a piece of text. Natural Language API measures sentiment with a numerical score which can be positive or negative and a magnitude which measures intensity from 0 to 1. In this way,, it’s possible to quickly determine the general sentiment of a whole body of text.

Entity analysis

When you read an article on the web and come across a public figure or a reference to a historical event, you don’t typically need the author of the text to describe those things to you to understand what is being said because of your familiarity with these popular subjects. Achieving the same level of insight with a computer typically requires large amounts of training data. Natural Language API already has that training data and the built-in capability for entity recognition and entity extraction. Identify entities within documents—including contracts, invoices, and receipts—and apply labels by types such as contact information, organization, location, and products. The API also allows you to quantify the centrality or importance of an entity to the rest of the document by assigning salience scores to entities.

Entity sentiment analysis

Combine sentiment analysis and entity analysis and you get the ability to determine the sentiment (positive or negative) around specific entities within a body of text. The API identifies entities, assigns them numerical scores and magnitude, and then aggregates these scores into an overall sentiment score. This added granularity can be very powerful. For example, you can programmatically crawl bulk reviews to understand customer opinions around specific products or features, extracting actionable insights for improving them.

Syntax analysis

It goes without saying that if a computer is to understand human speech the way we do, it must be familiar with grammatical rules and know the difference between nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Syntax analysis or syntactic analysis is the branch of linguistics concerned with breaking language into parts. In the context of NLP, that means breaking down the text into a series of sentences and tokens (generally words) and tagging them with metadata based on their grammatical function. Syntax analysis takes each word and returns a rich analysis of grammatical information such as whether a word is a noun or a verb if it’s the subject of a sentence, its case, it’s tense, and even its grammatical mood. By developing a semantic structure of a given token about all other tokens within a text document (using dependency trees), a computer can understand sentences and how they work.

Content classification

Google Cloud Natural Language API comes with an easy-to-use text classification model that can classify content into a hierarchy of categories with subcategories. For example, a blog post covering the music theory behind Mozart’s Lacrimosa would be classified under the following hierarchy: Arts & Entertainment/Music & Audio/Classical Music. You can find a complete list of built-in content categories here.

Google Cloud Natural Language API vs. Google AutoML Natural Language

While Google Cloud Natural Language API gives you plug-and-play access to NLP features that perform well out of the box, not everyone will be satisfied with cookie-cutter models the API provides.

For users with more specialized needs, Google AutoML Natural Language gives you the ability to provide your training data to create your custom machine,, learning models. It’s still a cloud service with all the convenience and perks of a public REST API that works seamlessly with Google Cloud Storage, but with the additional ability to create content classification, entity analysis, and sentiment analysis models that are tailored to your needs. Additionally,, AutoML offers support for larger custom data sets, including 5,000 classification labels, 1 million documents, and 10 MB document size.

The following table breaks down the key differences between Natural Language API and AutoML Natural Language:

Natural Language	FEATURES	AutoML
✔	REST API	✔
Uses a built-in sentiment score and magnitude to calculate sentiment.	Sentiment Analysis Understand the overall opinion or sentiment of a block of text.	Create a custom domain-specific sentiment score
Uses pre-existing keywords or phrases for entity labels.	Entity Analysis Identify entities within documents and label them.	Label entities with your domain-specific keywords or phrases.
✔	Syntax Analysis Break text up into tokens, sentences, and dependency trees.	X
Leverage 700+ predefined categories to classify documents	Content Classification Classify content into hierarchical categories.	Use your training data to create custom categories.
✔	Multi-Language Support for English, Japanese, Chinese,	✔
	Spanish, Portuguese, and more.

‍

What talent do you need to use NLP in Your business?

That said, there are advantages to hiring an NLP pro to unlock the full disruptive potential of this technology. Here are some examples of skills you might look for in an NLP engineer:

Software development
Working knowledge of NLP
Experience making JSON requests via REST APIs
Python development experience
Data science and analytics
Google Cloud Platform, Cloud Console, and other cloud services

Interested in leveraging Natural Language API in your business? Consider consulting with an NLP engineer on Up work today.

Safety note: This is not a prescription or diagnosis. For severe symptoms, pregnancy danger signs, children with serious illness, chest pain, breathing difficulty, stroke-like weakness, or major injury, seek urgent care.

Which doctor may help?

Start with a registered doctor or the nearest qualified health center.

What to tell the doctor

Write when the problem started and how it changed.
Bring old prescriptions, investigation reports, and current medicines.
Write allergies, pregnancy status, diabetes, kidney/liver disease, and major past illnesses.
Bring one family member if the patient is weak, elderly, confused, or a child.

Questions to ask

What is the most likely cause of my symptoms?
Which danger signs mean I should go to hospital quickly?
Which tests are necessary now, and which can wait?
How should I take medicines safely and what side effects should I watch for?
When should I come for follow-up?

Tests to discuss

Vital signs: temperature, pulse, blood pressure, oxygen saturation
Basic physical examination by a clinician
CBC, urine test, blood sugar, or imaging only when clinically needed

Avoid these mistakes

Do not use antibiotics, steroid tablets/injections, or strong painkillers without proper medical advice.
Do not hide pregnancy, kidney disease, ulcer, allergy, or blood thinner use.
Do not delay emergency care when danger signs are present.

Medicine safety and first-aid guide

This section is for patient education only. It does not replace a doctor, pharmacist, or emergency care.

Safe first steps

Rest, drink safe water, and observe symptoms carefully.
Keep a written note of symptoms, duration, temperature, medicines already taken, and allergy history.
Seek medical care quickly if symptoms are severe, worsening, or unusual for the patient.

OTC medicine safety

For mild pain or fever, ask a registered pharmacist or doctor before using common over-the-counter pain/fever medicines.
Do not combine multiple pain medicines without advice, especially if you have kidney disease, liver disease, stomach ulcer, asthma, pregnancy, or take blood thinners.
Do not give adult medicines to children unless a qualified clinician advises it.

Avoid these mistakes

Do not start antibiotics without a proper medical decision.
Do not use steroid tablets or injections casually for quick relief.
Do not delay emergency care because of home remedies.

Get urgent help if

Severe symptoms, confusion, fainting, breathing difficulty, chest pain, severe dehydration, or sudden weakness need urgent medical care.

Medicine names, dose, and timing must be decided by a qualified clinician or pharmacist after checking age, pregnancy, allergy, other diseases, and current medicines.

For rural patients and family caregivers

Patient health record and symptom diary

Write your symptoms, medicines already taken, test results, and questions before visiting a doctor. This note stays on your device unless you print or copy it.

Doctor to discuss: Doctor / qualified healthcare provider

Tests to discuss with doctor

Basic vital signs: temperature, pulse, blood pressure, oxygen level if needed
Relevant blood, urine, imaging, or specialist tests only after clinical assessment

Questions to ask

What is the most likely cause of my symptoms?
Which warning signs mean I should go to emergency care?
Which tests are really needed now?
Which medicines are safe for my age, pregnancy status, allergy, kidney/liver/stomach condition, and current medicines?

Emergency warning signs such as chest pain, severe breathing difficulty, sudden weakness, confusion, severe dehydration, major injury, or loss of bladder/bowel control need urgent medical care. Do not wait for online information.

Go to emergency care if you notice:

Severe or rapidly worsening symptoms
Breathing difficulty, chest pain, fainting, confusion, severe weakness, major injury, or severe dehydration

Doctor / service to discuss: Qualified healthcare provider; specialist depends on symptoms and examination.

Step 1
Check danger signs first
If danger signs are present, seek emergency care and do not wait for online information.
Step 2
Record the symptom story
Write when symptoms started, severity, medicines already taken, allergies, pregnancy status, and test results.
Step 3
Visit a qualified clinician
A doctor, nurse, or qualified healthcare provider can examine you and decide which tests or treatment are needed.
Step 4
Do only useful tests
Do tests after clinical assessment. Avoid unnecessary tests, random antibiotics, or repeated medicines without diagnosis.
Step 5
Follow up and return early if worse
If symptoms worsen, new warning signs appear, or treatment is not helping, return for review quickly.

Rural patient practical tips

Take a written symptom diary and all previous prescriptions/test reports.
Do not hide medicines already taken, even herbal or over-the-counter medicines.
Ask which warning signs mean urgent referral to hospital.

This roadmap is for education. A real diagnosis and treatment plan requires history, examination, and clinical judgment.

RX Patient Help

Ask a health question safely

Write your symptom story. A health professional or site editor can review it before any answer is prepared. This box is not for emergency care.

Emergency first: Severe chest pain, breathing trouble, unconsciousness, stroke signs, severe injury, heavy bleeding, or rapidly worsening symptoms need urgent local medical care now.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is natural language processing?

What are the benefits of NLP for your business?

NLP is more than just a technology buzzword, it can bring real value to your business in a myriad of ways. Examples of ways Google Cloud Natural Language API can help your business include: Leveraging sentiment analysis within your chat and email clients to track customer satisfaction over time. Using entity sentiment analysis to track approval ratings of executives across social media and news. Extracting data from text information scraped from the web to assist with market research. Analyzing language…

What is Google Cloud Natural Language API?

Google Cloud Natural Language API featuresGoogle Cloud Natural Language API boasts several features that let you make the most of unstructured language data. Like any REST API, it gives you the ability to make JSON requests and responses to manipulate plain text. Let's take a look at some of the things you can do with this powerful API.Sentiment analysisRead an online product review, and you’ll instantly be able to tell whether that review was positive, neutral, or negative, just from the tone of the customer’s written voice. Sentiment analysis is the NLP analog of this human ability to judge the tone of a piece of text. Natural Language API measures sentiment with a numerical score which can be positive or negative and a magnitude which measures intensity from 0 to 1. In this way,, it's possible to quickly determine the general sentiment of a whole body of text.Entity analysisWhen you read an article on the web and come across a public figure or a reference to a historical event, you don’t typically need the author of the text to describe those things to you to understand what is being said because of your familiarity with these popular subjects. Achieving the same level of insight with a computer typically requires large amounts of training data. Natural Language API already has that training data and the built-in capability for entity recognition and entity extraction. Identify entities within documents—including contracts, invoices, and receipts—and apply labels by types such as contact information, organization, location, and products. The API also allows you to quantify the centrality or importance of an entity to the rest of the document by assigning salience scores to entities.Entity sentiment analysisCombine sentiment analysis and entity analysis and you get the ability to determine the sentiment (positive or negative) around specific entities within a body of text. The API identifies entities, assigns them numerical scores and magnitude, and then aggregates these scores into an overall sentiment score. This added granularity can be very powerful. For example, you can programmatically crawl bulk reviews to understand customer opinions around specific products or features, extracting actionable insights for improving them.Syntax analysisIt goes without saying that if a computer is to understand human speech the way we do, it must be familiar with grammatical rules and know the difference between nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Syntax analysis or syntactic analysis is the branch of linguistics concerned with breaking language into parts. In the context of NLP, that means breaking down the text into a series of sentences and tokens (generally words) and tagging them with metadata based on their grammatical function. Syntax analysis takes each word and returns a rich analysis of grammatical information such as whether a word is a noun or a verb if it’s the subject of a sentence, its case, it's tense, and even its grammatical mood. By developing a semantic structure of a given token about all other tokens within a text document (using dependency trees), a computer can understand sentences and how they work.Content classificationGoogle Cloud Natural Language API comes with an easy-to-use text classification model that can classify content into a hierarchy of categories with subcategories. For example, a blog post covering the music theory behind Mozart’s Lacrimosa would be classified under the following hierarchy: Arts & Entertainment/Music & Audio/Classical Music. You can find a complete list of built-in content categories here.Google Cloud Natural Language API vs. Google AutoML Natural LanguageWhile Google Cloud Natural Language API gives you plug-and-play access to NLP features that perform well out of the box, not everyone will be satisfied with cookie-cutter models the API provides.For users with more specialized needs, Google AutoML Natural Language gives you the ability to provide your training data to create your custom machine,, learning models. It’s still a cloud service with all the convenience and perks of a public REST API that works seamlessly with Google Cloud Storage, but with the additional ability to create content classification, entity analysis, and sentiment analysis models that are tailored to your needs. Additionally,, AutoML offers support for larger custom data sets, including 5,000 classification labels, 1 million documents, and 10 MB document size.The following table breaks down the key differences between Natural Language API and AutoML Natural Language:Natural Language FEATURES AutoML✔ REST API ✔Uses a built-in sentiment score and magnitude to calculate sentiment. Sentiment Analysis Understand the overall opinion or sentiment of a block of text. Create a custom domain-specific sentiment scoreUses pre-existing keywords or phrases for entity labels. Entity Analysis Identify entities within documents and label them. Label entities with your domain-specific keywords or phrases.✔ Syntax Analysis Break text up into tokens, sentences, and dependency trees. XLeverage 700+ predefined categories to classify documents Content Classification Classify content into hierarchical categories. Use your training data to create custom categories.✔ Multi-Language Support for English, Japanese, Chinese, ✔Spanish, Portuguese, and more.‍What talent do you need to use NLP in Your business?

The nice thing about Google Cloud Natural Language API is that you don’t need to hire someone with a background in machine learning to use it. A REST API developer experience in making JSON requests is all that’s required to add basic NLP functionality to your apps. That said, there are advantages to hiring an NLP pro to unlock the full disruptive potential of this technology. Here are some examples of skills you might look for in an NLP engineer: Software…

References

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Understand this article easily

Article Summary

Key Takeaways

Seek urgent medical care if you notice

Emergency now

See a doctor

Learn safely

What is natural language processing?

What are the benefits of NLP for your business?

What is Google Cloud Natural Language API?

Google Cloud Natural Language API features

Sentiment analysis

Entity analysis

Entity sentiment analysis

Syntax analysis

Content classification

Google Cloud Natural Language API vs. Google AutoML Natural Language

What talent do you need to use NLP in Your business?

Prepare before seeing a doctor

Which doctor may help?

What to tell the doctor

Questions to ask

Tests to discuss

Avoid these mistakes

Medicine safety and first-aid guide

Safe first steps

OTC medicine safety

Avoid these mistakes

Get urgent help if

Patient health record and symptom diary

Care roadmap for: What Is NLP (natural language processing)

Check danger signs first

Record the symptom story

Visit a qualified clinician

Do only useful tests

Follow up and return early if worse

Ask a health question safely

Frequently Asked Questions

References

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