Is learning language complicated?

If humans struggle with it, how is it that computers understand, interpret and manipulate human language?

How far have we come with the capacity to have our machines work with human language?

When we talk about computers interfacing with human language we talk about “natural language”. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the branch of artificial intelligence concerned with getting computers to do useful things with human languages.

In this talk we take a look at what it means for a machine to understand or use a natural language like English, German or Chinese. We will look at six key areas in the marketplace today: speech technologies, conversational agents, text analytics, machine translation, natural language generation, and text correction. In each case we provide examples of what is possible, separating the reality from the hype that surrounds artificial intelligence technologies; and we mull over what might be coming down the road towards us.

Presenter

Robert Dale, NLP Consultant, Language Technology Group