With the increasing usage of the Web and other text application areas, the demands in both text mining and natural language processing (NLP) have been increasing. Researchers in text mining have hoped that NLP—the attempt to extract a fuller meaning representation from free text—can provide useful improvements to text mining applications of all kinds. The primary goal of Natural language processing (NLP) is to implement within computers the skill to understand a normal human language or natural language. It is related to the field of computer- human interaction. One of the motivation of NLP is for the society whose access to web information is obstructed simply by their inability to use key-board and operating system. Natural language comes under the domain of artificial intelligence with the goal of understanding and creating meaningful expressions in human-language. Artificial intelligence is the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior .Therefore NLP uses Artificial Intelligence, and is used to recover information in data mining. This paper presents a survey on Natural language processing (NLP) and its approaches.