Using computers that recognize what you mean

Have you ever tried to search for something and had trouble finding it? More specifically, have you ever tried to find the one article that you remember reading last year that talked about the impact of how the problems with bundled mortgage loans led to the 2008 global recession—you know, the one that talked about that guy who warned everyone about how bundled mortgages were much riskier than most people thought, but no one listened to him? Try doing a search for that to see how long will it take you to find it. It probably depends on a couple of things: whether you come up with the right set of keywords, how much time it takes to look at different documents, and broken links. What about completely irrelevant information that happened to coincide with the same set of keywords? And that's assuming you even know where to look in the first place – beyond searching the entire internet.

Human language is a tricky thing. Grammatical rules give structure...