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Natural language understanding

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Natural language understanding is a sub-field of artificial intelligence research defoted to making computers "understand" statements written in human languages.

It is sometimes referred to as an AI-hard problem, because natural language recognition seems to require extensive knowledge about the outside world and the ability to manipulate it. The definition of "understanding" is one of the major problems in natural language processing.

Some examples of the problems faced by natural language understanding systems:

  • The sentences We gave the monkeys the bananas because thay were hungry and We gave the monkeys the bananas because thay were over-ripe have the same surface grammatical structure. However, in one of them the word they refers to the monkeys, in the other it refers to the bananas: the sentence cannot be parsed properly without knowledge of the properties and behaviour of monkeys and bananas.
  • Time flies like an arrow can be parsed in many different ways.

See also:

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