Artificial Intelligence (often shorten with A.I.) is a field of computer science and research which aims to develop intelligent machines, computer systems, and agents able to perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence.
What is intelligence, anyway? The Standford’s University defines it as “the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world”.
In an article written in 1950, Alan Turing discussed the conditions for considering a machine to be intelligent: according to his work, when a machine could pretend to be human to an actual human, then it certainly should be considered it intelligent.
Is this enough? Well, it is arguable. In 1998 Daniel Dennett implemented various Turing’s tests and it turned out that some people are easily led into believing that a rather dumb program is intelligent.
How can artificial intelligence help writers?
While NLP (natural language processing) is evolving into NLU (natural language understanding), we are facing a huge revolution in writing and – especially – web writing. Artificial Intelligence is already able to write news stories starting from different sources, edit articles and review their grammar and wording, quickly scan articles to find relevant information. These technologies are going to simplify the repetitive tasks for content writers, helping them focus on what they care most: writing good stories, suggesting to their readers well-informed opinions, and writing critics and comments.
On the other side, the semantic web is feeding search engines with meanings and data, which help them compute information, interpret users’ intent, and serve them with the most fitting and useful results. Google’s machine learning algorithm, RankBrain is a bright example of how quickly search engines are evolving in this scenario.
If you are interested in this topic, read this article by Ben Dickson about the impact of AI on professional writing.
How is WordLift using AI?
WordLift uses NLP, which is an intersection between AI and linguistics, to suggest content editors relevant information, images and links by analyzing the pages and articles they write.
To be more specific, WordLift uses Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Named Entity Disambiguation (NED) to extract Named Entities from textual contents. Editors can reconcile entities extracted from their posts and pages with equivalent entities available on other sources.
In this way, WordLift helps machines (such as computational search engines, personal assistants, and more) unambiguously interpret the context to whom the content belongs.