NLU
Natural Language Understanding
A system's ability to understand natural language — the meaning, intent and entities in a freely written message, with typos, slang or unexpected phrasing. The component that separates an assistant that "gets it" from a button menu that demands exact wording.
- Appeared
- An NLP subfield with a long history; revolutionized by LLMs from 2022.
- Tactics
- In AI assistants, NLU comes natively from the [LLM](#llm): we no longer train separate intent classifiers, relying instead on the model's contextual understanding.
“NLU” is part of Glossary · AI Chatbot — part of the Atlas, Websem's reference of AI search, marketing and data terms.