language naturally spoken by humans, as opposed to "constructed" and "formal" languages
Natural language is the everyday language that people speak and write, like English or Spanish, as opposed to artificial languages created for specific purposes like programming code or mathematical notation. It matters because it's how humans naturally communicate with each other, and understanding how to process and work with natural language is important for creating technology that can interact with people in ways that feel intuitive and human-like.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
A natural language or ordinary language is any spoken language or signed language used organically in a human community, first emerging without conscious premeditation and subject to: replication across generations of people in the community, regional expansion or contraction, and gradual internal and structural changes. The vast majority of languages in the world are natural languages. As a category, natural language includes both standard dialects (ones with high social prestige) as well as nonstandard or vernacular dialects. Even an official language with a regulating academy such as Standard French, overseen by the Académie Française, is still classified as a natural language (e.g. in the field of natural language processing), as its prescriptive aspects do not make it regulated enough to be considered a constructed or controlled natural language. Linguists broadly consider writing to be a static visual representation of a particular natural language, though, in many cases in highly literate modern societies, writing itself is also now subject to the natural processes of widely spoken natural languages.
Excluded from the definition of natural language are: artificial and constructed languages, such as those developed for works of fiction; languages of formal logic, such as those in computer programming; and non-human communication systems in nature, such as whale vocalizations or honey bees' waggle dance. The academic consensus is that particular key features prevent animal communication systems from being classified as languages at all. Certain systems of human communication with no native speakers, as sometimes used in cross-cultural contexts, are also not natural languages.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).