Natural language understanding (NLU) is a branch of artificial intelligence that focuses on understanding and analysing human language. NLU refers to the ability of machines to understand and process natural language, i.e. the language we use in our everyday communication, including understanding the meaning and intent behind words and phrases.

It has to deal with drawbacks such as interchanged words, colloquialisms, contradictions or misspellings in order to understand the message being conveyed.

NLU is used in a variety of applications, such as chatbots, customer support systems, virtual assistants, sentiment analysis, machine translation, among others. NLU algorithms use natural language processing techniques, which involve the decomposition of language into its basic components, such as words, phrases and sentences, and the identification of grammatical patterns and rules.

NLU systems can be trained with large amounts of linguistic data to improve their comprehension and accuracy. Some of the most common approaches used in NLU include parsing, semantic analysis, word disambiguation and entity identification.