NLP Article #1 : A word is worth a 1000 pictures

Natural Language Processing is quite simply the study and use of machines to intelligently use, and create, natural language. I purposely leave out the word'understand' for now, as it is a bit of a prickly subject when using probabilistic models. But the conundrum is the following: In terms of bit-rate, verbal communication is awful. A lecturer might utter 300 words per minute, which is the paltry rate of about 70 bytes/second. But switch to a two-way conversation, and that can drop even further to 100 words/minute, or a definitely anaemic 25 bytes/second.