Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) is a state-of-the-art model for natural language processing (NLP) tasks developed by Google. Unlike previous models that processed text in a single direction, BERT uses a bidirectional approach to understand the context of each word in a sentence. This allows BERT to perform exceptionally well on tasks such as question answering, language inference, and text classification by capturing the nuanced meaning of words based on their surrounding context.