Text Mining: How Do Computers Understand Language?

Text is everywhere. From tweets to the gigantic records of governments, machine processing of text is now subtle and pervasive. We can automatically identify authors of works, look for disease within tweets and even construct chatbots which can convince some people that these machines are human. In this lecture, we provide a brief history of text processing and look towards the future when the computer sonnet or love poem might become a reality.A lecture by Richard Harvey, IT Livery Company Professor of Information Technology 16 April 2019The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/text-miningGresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege Support the show