How Do Computers Understand Language?

Computers can pretend to understand words by turning them into numbers. Imagine a special code that turns 'hello' into 12345 and 'goodbye' into 67890, the computer just looks up these numbers in its codebook. It uses this trick to know when two sentences are similar, even if they use different words.

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Examples

A computer sees 'cat' as number 12345 and 'dog' as number 67890, it can recognize if a sentence is about a cat or a dog by checking the numbers.
When you ask a computer, 'What is the capital of France?', it looks up words in its codebook to find an answer.
A smart speaker hears 'Play music' and matches each word to a command in its list.

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Categories: Technology · artificial intelligence· natural language processing· computing