Natural languages (speech and text) are the way we communicate as species. They help us to express whatever is inside to the outer world.

Natural languages are not designed. They emerge. Thus, they are messy and semi-structured. If they were designed, NLP would be already solved, using context-free grammars and finite automata by linguists 50 years ago.

Today, we are trying to artificially “learn” language from text using state-of-the-art Deep Neural Language Models that behave probabilistically, predicting the next token in a sequence.

Moreover, natural languages are not static. They evolve and change. Different words can be used in different times with different meaning. It is a moving target.

Plato, the Greek philosopher was negative with “languages” -despite the fact the he has written so much- because a language cannot express the fullness of a human mind, of a person. Socrates and many philosophers from the Peripatetic school never wrote texts. The only way they were communicate was by real human communication (body language, eyes, speech, touch). Only with this way, a human mind and heart can evolve and create new worlds.

However, we are living in a century where everything is either digitalised or written and human communication goes to minimum.

Plato