NaturalLanguage + Translation

Analyze natural language text for tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, language identification, and word/sentence embeddings. Translate text between languages with the Translation framework.

This skill covers two related frameworks: NaturalLanguage (NLTokenizer, NLTagger, NLEmbedding) for on-device text analysis, and Translation (TranslationSession, LanguageAvailability) for language translation.

Scope boundary: Use this skill after you already have text. It owns tokenization, language identification, POS/NER tagging, sentiment, embeddings, custom NLModel classifiers/taggers, and in-app translation. Hand off OCR to vision-framework, speech-to-text to speech-recognition, UI strings and locale formatting to ios-localization, and generative summarization or Apple Intelligence workflows to apple-on-device-ai.

Contents

• Setup
• Tokenization
• Language Identification
• Part-of-Speech Tagging
• Named Entity Recognition
• Sentiment Analysis
• Text Embeddings
• Translation
• Common Mistakes
• Review Checklist
• References

Setup

Import NaturalLanguage for text analysis and Translation for language translation. No special entitlements or capabilities are required for NaturalLanguage. Translation has split availability: system translation presentation is iOS 17.4+ / macOS 14.4+, while TranslationSession, .translationTask(), LanguageAvailability, and batch translation require iOS 18+ / macOS 15+. Direct TranslationSession(installedSource:target:) is the non-UI option, but only when the source and target languages are already installed on device.

import NaturalLanguage
import Translation