Humans communicate using Natural Language whilst computers communicate using constrained and highly specific languages - normally programming languages. However, for computers to become more useful they need to be able to communicate with us using our language(s). Natural Language Processing is all about developing systems which can understand our natural language.

Some examples of areas we are working on include:

Sentiment Analysis

Can we understand the sentiment of the author? Were they happy or sad? Were they angry or calm? This can be used to better understand the meaning of some natural language.

Textual Entailment

Textual entailment is a task which is quite easy for humans to perform, but not so for computers. If you're given a piece of text and a statement can you say if the statement is true or false based on the text provided?