natural language understanding
Subfield of NLP focused on enabling computers to interpret the meaning of human language, not just its structure.
2 milestones
SHRDLU Natural Language Understanding Program Developed by Terry Winograd at MIT
In 1970, Terry Winograd at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology completed SHRDLU, a natural language understanding program that allowed a user to converse in English about a simulated world of coloured blocks, demonstrating that a computer could parse and respond to complex grammatical instructions within a constrained domain.
STUDENT: Daniel G. Bobrow's Natural Language Algebra Problem Solver
In 1964, Daniel G. Bobrow, then a doctoral student at MIT, completed STUDENT, a LISP-based program that read English-language algebra word problems and solved them symbolically. It was among the earliest demonstrations that a computer could parse and act on natural-language mathematical statements.