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Getting to Know Natural Language Understanding
We like to imagine talking to computers the way Picard spoke to Data in Next Generation, but in reality, natural language processing is more than just teaching a computer to understand words. The subtext of how and why we use the words we do is notoriously difficult for computers to comprehend. Instead of Data, we get frustrations with our assistants and endless SNL jokes.
[Related article: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing (NLP)]
The Challenges of AI Language Processing
Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a subfield of NLP concerned with teaching computers to comprehend the deeper contextual meanings of human communication. It’s considered an AI-hard problem for a few notable reasons. Let’s take a look at why computers can win chess matches against world champions and calculate billions of bits of data in seconds but can’t seem to grasp sarcasm.
Humans Make Mistakes
The first obstacle is teaching a computer to understand despite typos and misspellings. Humans aren’t always accurate in what they write, but a simple typo that you could skip right over without missing a beat could be enough to trip up the filters for computer understanding.
