Introduction to Natural Language Processing

How do computers understand language? It seems impossible that zeroes and ones could ever add up to words that humans can understand, but machine language has come a long way in the past few years. Let us take you behind the code to explain how machines simulate language comprehension, and why it’s a far more complicated problem than “bonjour = hello”.

This talk is aimed at an audience who is not necessarily familiar with computers or language comprehension, but would like a primer to the field, and what it can realistically do. We explain natural language processing from the perspective of machines that cannot understand words, but capture semantic meaning by processing data.