As you read this article, your brain not only takes in individual words, but also combines them to extract the meaning of each sentence. It is a feat any competent reader takes for granted, but it's beyond even the most sophisticated of today's computer programs. Now their abilities may be about to leap ahead, thanks to a form of graphical mathematics borrowed from quantum mechanics.
"It's important for people like Google," says physicist Bob Coecke at the University of Oxford, who is pioneering the new approach to linguistics. At the moment computers "only understand sentences as a bag of different words without any structure".
To read the rest of the article, click here.