Def 1: Natural language refers to the medium in which humans communicate with each other. This could be in the form of writing (text) for example emails, articles, news, blogs, bank documents, etc, or speech for example lectures, speeches, audio calls, etc. NLP is one of the major AI technologies aimed at making machines capable enough to interpret speech and text-based human language.
Def2: Natural Language Processing is a branch of linguistics, AI, and CS for the manipulation, and translation of natural language which gives machines the ability to read, understand and derive meaning from human language [4].
Def 3: Simply put, NLP is a set of computational techniques that allow machines to understand and manipulate human spoken languages

Why NLP is so important?

By now we have to work with a huge amount of data. In Machine Learning we mainly work with those numerical values. How we can get some actions on text data like news reports, social media comments and posts, and customer reviews in the online stores? We can use Natural language processing techniques to do that.[3].Not only that, Even now we have made daily work easier by using applications made from NLP. Summarization applications, spell checker applications, and machine translations are some of them [3].
Computers and machines are great at working with tabular data or spreadsheets. However, human beings generally communicate in words and sentences, not in the form of tables. Much information that humans speak or write is unstructured. So it is not very clear for computers to interpret such. In natural language processing (NLP), the goal is to make computers understand the unstructured text and retrieve meaningful pieces of information from it [2]
“Well NLP is cool and stuff, but how can we leverage it to improve our businesses more efficiently? How it could differ from the more traditional techniques?” [5].As we have said before, NLP allows machines to effectively understand and manipulate human languages. With that, you will be able to automate a lot of tasks and improve their rapidity and scale, like data labeling, translation, customer feedback, and text analysis. Applying NLP to real-world cases and not just for research purposes, will bring a significant competitive advantage to many businesses [5]
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References

1- What is Natural Language?
2- Natural Language Processing (NLP) with Python
3-NLP Techniques
4- Day 1–30 Days of Natural Language Processing Series with Projects
5- Building An NLP Project From Zero To Hero (1): Project Overview
6- What is Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Why is it Even Relevant in 2022?