natural

Definition

Meaning "as humans actually use it", nearly always inside the phrase natural language — the ambiguous, context-dependent language people speak and write, as opposed to formal or programming languages. The same adjective appears in natural images, meaning photographs of the real world rather than rendered or synthetic ones. In both cases it marks the messy, uncurated version of the data.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Explained: Compile by Training — Turning a Natural-Language Spec into a Function That Runs LocallyCompile by Training: Turning Natural-Language Specifications into Local Neural Functions
• Why Language Models Hallucinate — The Mechanics and What Actually HelpsSurvey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation
• How VLMs Came Together — Wiring a Vision Encoder into an LLMLearning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision