Google Speaks in Tongues

Teaching a computer to understand languages isn’t rocket science — it’s not nearly that easy, said Peter Norvig, director of research at Google. It takes a limited number of calculations to send a spacecraft to the moon, Mars or other planets. And while the calculations aren’t so simple, they are fairly easily managed by a computer, he said. But learning what words mean, how they fit together and how they translate into other languages is much more challenging, he said.