From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018) :
natural language processing
(NLP) Computer understanding,
analysis, manipulation, and/or generation of natural
language.
This can refer to anything from fairly simple
string-manipulation tasks like stemming, or building
concordances of natural language texts, to higher-level
AI-like tasks like processing user queries in natural
language.
(1997-09-12)