The techniques of NLP and text analytics overlap a great deal. The differences mainly lie in the problem that each tries to solve. In the search world, natural language processing analyzes user inputs (queries) to understand their intent.
It allows a user to communicate with a machine in a way that is natural for the user, which, of course, is not natural for the machine.To accomplish this, NLP operates on data so that a computer can understand a document—and the relationships it may infer—in the same way a user understands it. It’s wise here to remember that infer means to “make an educated guess.” This is where NLP and text analytics use many of
the same methods.