NLP is Not What You Think


As an American living in England, there are times when differences in the meanings of words lead me astray.

“Would you like chips with that?”

Do they mean American chips or British chips —thin, round potato slices or the related, chunkier, potato sticks?

Or did they recognize my American accent, adapt their vocabulary, and are actually offering me the sticks, e.g., fries? Or maybe I don’t even notice the ambiguity in meaning until I’m surprised by the dish placed before me.

These sorts of confusions happen all the time. There’s even a linguistic term for words with many related meanings: polysemy.

So you can imagine what might happen when this sort of misunderstanding occurs at scale. With many unaware that other meanings even exist. But people should know, because the implications are greater than getting served up the wrong dish.

Welcome to the story of NLP — a tale of developments in programming science for impersonating human language. And of the humans impersonating programming science in the name of personal development.

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