Natural language generation

Natural language as oppose to machine language.

Generation as oppose to parsing.

In the field of computer science, we use the term 'language' for computer languages like Perl, C++, etc. To distinguish the languages that we speak everyday to the computer languages, we use the term 'natural language'.

There are two opposing terms in NLP. Parsing means to process text and translate it into some structured form of meaning. Generation goes the opposite way. To put it in a simpler way, parsing is like what human does when they are reading or listen to a text or speech and try to understand the meaing; generation is like what human does when they have an idea in mind and try to express it by writing or speaking.