AIs that read sentences can also spot virus mutations

In a study published in Science today, Berger and her colleagues pull several of these strands together and use NLP to predict mutations that allow viruses to avoid being detected by antibodies in the human immune system, a process known as viral immune escape. The basic idea is that the interpretation of a virus by an immune system is analogous to the interpretation of a sentence by a human. "It's a neat paper, building off the momentum of previous work," says Ali Madani, a scientist at Salesforce, who is using NLP to predict protein sequences. Berger's team uses two different linguistic concepts: grammar and semantics (or meaning). The genetic or evolutionary fitness of a virus--characteristics such as how good it is at infecting a host--can be interpreted in terms of grammatical correctness.