Google is among those at the forefront of this research—such tech plays into both its primary search engine and the Siri-like assistant it operates on Android phones—and today, the company signaled just how big of a role this technology will play in its future. It open sourced the software that serves as the foundation for its natural language work, freely sharing it with the world at large. Yes, that’s the way it now works in the tech world. Companies will give away some of their most important stuff as a way of driving a market forward.
This newly open source software is called SyntaxNet, and among natural language researchers, it’s known as a syntactic parser. Using deep neural networks, SyntaxNet parses sentences in an effort to understand what role each word plays and how they all come together to create real meaning. The system tries to identify the underlying grammatical logic—what’s a noun, what’s a verb, what the subject refers to, how it relates to the object—and then, using this info, it tries to extract what the sentence is generally about—the gist, but in a form machines can read and manipulate.