Another important area in which neural networks have recently excelled is natural language processing, the field of enabling computers to learn human (natural) languages. This covers a wide range of areas, including: 

  • Speech recognition (e.g. in personal assistants) 
  • Language and text comprehension 
  • Natural language production (e.g. summarising and creating texts) 
  • Machine translation 

Like vision, human language has been a key factor in the survival and evolution of our species. And like vision, it is an extremely complex task where previous approaches and models have performed poorly.

This is because context plays an important role in human language and the semantics of words depend on this context.