Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a subfield of artificial intelligence that focuses on the interaction between computers and humans through natural language. The ultimate objective is to enable computers to understand, interpret, generate, and respond to human languages in a manner that is both meaningful and useful. NLP involves several challenges including language modeling, parsing, sentiment analysis, machine translation, and speech recognition. It is used in various applications such as chatbots, translators, and search engines, making it easier for machines to understand and communicate with humans. Advances in NLP are also providing tools for data analytics, automating routine tasks, and offering new avenues for human-computer interaction.