How computers learn languages
We Need to Talk
Whether through voice assistants, chatbots, or the automatic analysis of documents, rapid developments in AI are helping speech technologies make inroads. But how does AI manage to understand the subtleties of human language?
Language is the medium through which people communicate and express their thoughts. It is an ancient dream of mankind to be able to communicate with a machine (for example, just watch 2001: A Space Odyssey).
Meanwhile, science has come a bit closer to this vision. The box entitled "Sample Dialogue with LaMDA" contains a conversation with the Language Model for Dialogue Applications [1] (LaMDA) dialogue model. It was assigned the identity of a Weddell Seal in the first line. As you can see, LaMDA can give grammatically and contextually correct answers and even play with the meanings of words. But how does a computer system manage to achieve language fluency?
To understand language, the system needs to know the meaning of words. For this purpose, each word is represented by a long vector of 100 to 1,000 real numbers. This vector is known as embedding. Now, for example, because "sofa" and "couch" both refer to upholstered seating furniture for several people, their embeddings should also be similar. This means that very similar numbers should be found at the same positions of the vector. Other words such as "dive" have very different meanings, so their embeddings should be very different from the one just mentioned.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Blender App Makes it to the Big Screen
The animated film "Flow" won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature at the 97th Academy Awards held on March 2, 2025 and Blender was a part of it.
-
Linux Mint Retools the Cinnamon App Launcher
The developers of Linux Mint are working on an improved Cinnamon App Launcher with a better, more accessible UI.
-
New Linux Tool for Security Issues
Seal Security is launching a new solution to automate fixing Linux vulnerabilities.
-
Ubuntu 25.04 Coming Soon
Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) has been given an April release date with many notable updates.
-
Gnome Developers Consider Dropping RPM Support
In a move that might shock a lot of users, the Gnome development team has proposed the idea of going straight up Flatpak.
-
openSUSE Tumbleweed Ditches AppArmor for SELinux
If you're an openSUSE Tumbleweed user, you can expect a major change to the distribution.
-
Plasma 6.3 Now Available
Plasma desktop v6.3 has a couple of pretty nifty tricks up its sleeve.
-
LibreOffice 25.2 Has Arrived
If you've been hoping for a release that offers more UI customizations, you're in for a treat.
-
TuxCare Has a Big AlmaLinux 9 Announcement in Store
TuxCare announced it has successfully completed a Security Technical Implementation Guide for AlmaLinux OS 9.
-
First Release Candidate for Linux Kernel 6.14 Now Available
Linus Torvalds has officially released the first release candidate for kernel 6.14 and it includes over 500,000 lines of modified code, making for a small release.