The goal of the Spinoza project “Understanding language by machines” is to develop computer models that can assign deeper meaning to language that approximates human understanding and to use these models to automatically read and understand text. Current approaches to natural language understanding consider language as a closed-world of relations between words. Words and text are however highly ambiguous and vague. People do not notice this ambiguity when using language within their social communicative context. This project tries to get a better understanding of the scope and complexity of this ambiguity and how to model the social communicative contexts to help resolving it.
The project is divided into 4 subprojects, each investigating a different aspect of assigning meaning: 1: “The borders of ambiguity”; 2. “Word, concept, perception and brain”; 3. “Stories and world views as a key to understanding language”, and 4. “A quantum model of text understanding”.