When Alan Turing coined the Turing test in his paper “Computing machinery and intelligence”, which laid the foundations of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, he was confronted with the following question: “Do machines think?”
The story of Natural Language Processing (NLP) starts way before Siri uttered its first words. Its roots can be traced back to the early realization that giving computers the ability to understand natural language, a task that a 2-year old can solve, is actually tougher than it sounds.
In 1997, the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue beat the world chess champion Kasparov. In 2011, Watson, an AI-powered computer system also developed by IBM, competed on Jeopardy!, a TV quiz show where participants provide a question in response to general knowledge clues, and won the first place against two former champions. In 2016, Google’s AI…
