# Rasa NLU: Language Understanding for Chatbots and AI assistants [¶](https://legacy-docs-v1.rasa.com/1.8.3/nlu/about/#rasa-nlu-language-understanding-for-chatbots-and-ai-assistants "Permalink to this headline")

Rasa NLU is an open-source natural language processing tool for intent classification, response retrieval and
entity extraction in chatbots. For example, taking a sentence like

```
"I am looking for a Mexican restaurant in the center of town"
```

and returning structured data like

```
{
  "intent": "search_restaurant",
  "entities": {
    "cuisine" : "Mexican",
    "location" : "center"
  }
}
```

Rasa NLU used to be a separate library, but it is now part of the Rasa framework.

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