Teaching computers to understand our language
Yulan He · Futurum Careers · 2022
Are you up to anything this weekend?'This sentence provides a simple example of how different contexts can alter a sentence's intended meaning.If you are asked this by a colleague or teacher, they are likely just making small talk.However, if you are asked this by a friend, they might be seeking to find out whether you have any free time to socialise with them.As social animals, we naturally understand and interpret subtle differences like this, which occur during hundreds of our interactions every day.But, this concept of understanding the subtleties of language is very difficult to instil in computers.Professor Yulan He is a computer scientist at the University of Warwick, working in the field of natural language processing.She is training artificial intelligence (AI) to overcome this challenge through sophisticated reading comprehension exercises."Language understanding is extremely difficult for computers due to the variety, ambiguity, subtlety and expressiveness of human languages," she says.She is drawing information from a multitude of sources to provide a knowledge base that computer models can 'learn' from, and contribute to, to build the models' understanding of how we use language.