Natural Language Understanding (NLU)
The ability of AI to comprehend the meaning, intent, and context of human language, going beyond surface-level text processing to genuine semantic understanding.
Tasks
Intent classification, sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, semantic parsing, coreference resolution, and question answering. NLU is the 'understanding' half of NLP (the other being generation).
LLMs and NLU
Large language models have dramatically advanced NLU by learning rich representations of language during pre-training. However, debate continues about whether LLMs truly 'understand' language or merely demonstrate sophisticated pattern matching.