
Christopher Bishop in his seminal work “Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning” describes the concept like this: ”...pattern recognition deals with the automatic discovery of regularities in data through the use of computer algorithms and with the use of these regularities to take actions such as classifying the data into different categories.”
In other words, pattern recognition is identifying things by its features.
In the context of data analytics, pattern recognition is used to describe data, show its distinct features (i.e., the patterns itself) and put it into a broader context.
Text Generation, Text Analysis, Text Translation, Chatbots - Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Processing (aka NLP) is a field of Machine Learning focused on teaching machines to comprehend human language and generate its messages.
While it sounds like hard sci-fi, in reality, it doesn’t deal with the substance of communication (i.e., reading between the lines) - it only deals with what is directly expressed in the message.