# What is Natural Language Processing (NLP) vs Natural Language Understanding (NLU)?

_Last updated: 2026-07-20_  
_Reviewed by: Jason Burns, Editorial Steward_  
_Published by: AIDirectAnswers.com · Licensed under Citation License 1.0_

## Short answer

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the broad field of computer techniques for handling human language — tokenizing, parsing, translating, generating — while Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is the narrower subproblem of extracting meaning, intent, and inference from text.

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_Author: [Jason Burns](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-randolph-burns), Editorial Steward_  
_Published: 2026-07-20 · Modified: 2026-07-20_  
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