Understanding Language by Machines

The goal of Spinoza Prize projects “Understanding Language by Machines” is to develop computer models that can assign deeper meaning to language that approximates human understanding and to use these models to automatically read text and understand language in relation to the world. Current approaches to natural language understanding consider language as a closed-world of relations between words. Words and text are however highly ambiguous and vague while at the same time there is a large variation in the way we express similar things. People do not notice this ambiguity and variation when using language within their social communicative context. This project tries to get a better understanding of the scope and complexity of ambiguity and variation and to model the social communicative contexts to resolve it.

The project is divided into five subprojects, each investigating a different aspect of assigning meaning: