Artificial Intelligence | Lecture

When will our computers understand what we want to say and look for, and help us with our daily communication and information needs? Natural language processing is AI’s favourite pet. From Alan Turing to Peter Norvig we have learned that in order to crack AI, we need to crack language. With immense optimism it was believed in the 1950s that it would take just another decade to reach that goal. Since then, Natural Language Processing (NLP) has lost some of its nine lives in desperately failed attempts. However, with the recent and very successful introductions of speech recognition software by the biggest tech companies, the expectations are bigger than they ever were.

When will NLP technologies start writing our abstracts for us? And will we, in the near future be falling in love with our computer, as Joaquin Phoenix does in Spike Jonze’s contemporary science-fiction classic Her?

Professor Antal van den Bosch is a full professor of Language and speech technology at Radboud University Nijmegen. He is an international expert in the field of language technology and computational linguistics. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW) and fellow of the European Coordinating Committee of Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI). His work involves models that are able to explain the production and comprehension of language, techniques similar to the ones Apple’s voice recognition system Siri and Google’s Translate function are built upon.

In cooperation with the Erasmus Honours Academy.