Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques are essential tools in data science for analyzing and understanding text data. Key techniques include text tokenization (breaking text into smaller units like words or sentences), sentiment analysis (identifying emotions or opinions), and named entity recognition (NER) (extracting important names, dates, or places). Other methods like text summarization condense large texts into key points, while topic modeling groups similar ideas or themes. Word embeddings transform words into numerical formats for better analysis, and language translation helps analyze multilingual data. These techniques make handling unstructured text data efficient and insightful for decision-making.