Naturalsprachliche

Naturalsprachliche is a German-language adjective used to denote things pertaining to natural language—the language humans use in everyday communication—as opposed to formal or artificial languages such as programming languages or logical formalisms. The term appears in German linguistics and computational linguistics to describe data, phenomena, or systems that operate on natural language.

Although Verarbeitung natürlicher Sprache (VNS) is the standard German term for natural language processing, the adjective naturalsprachliche is frequently used in compound nouns and adjective-noun phrases, e.g., naturalsprachliche Daten (natural-language data) or naturalsprachliche Verarbeitung (natural-language processing). The form is productive in German, allowing constructions such as naturalsprachliche Anwendungen, naturalsprachliche Analysen, or naturalsprachliche Phänomene.

In practical contexts, naturalsprachliche topics include parsing, part-of-speech tagging, semantic analysis, machine translation, speech recognition, information extraction, and corpus linguistics. Research often contrasts naturalsprachliche data with formale Sprachen (formal languages) or with artificial languages used in computing. The term signals work that engages with human language rather than with strictly artificial systems.

Challenges in studying naturalsprachliche data reflect the intrinsic ambiguity, variability, and context-sensitivity of everyday language, requiring approaches from linguistics, statistics, and machine learning. The term serves as a bridge between theoretical linguistics and applied AI, indicating work that addresses natural language phenomena rather than only formal constructs.