How to feed and raise a Wikipedia robo-editor

Dr Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh from QMUL's School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science looks at what it takes to teach an AI how to read natural human languages. Wikipedia is to put artificial intelligence to the enormous task of keeping the free, editable online encyclopedia up-to-date, spam-free and legal. The Objective Revision Evaluation Service uses text-processing AI algorithms to scan recent edits for signs that they may be spam, trolling, revert wars (where edits are made and reversed endlessly), or otherwise dubious. But humans are excellent at making sense of the nuance of the written word - can a computer do the same? Natural language processing is a branch of AI, focusing not on creating smart computers but on intelligent comprehension of text. Its aim is to help computers understand human language, and communicate as humans do. Intelligent comprehension of language might mean lots of things. It might mean understanding the grammar of a language.