How can we tell if artificial intelligence understands our language?

This article is part of "the philosophy of artificial intelligence," a series of posts that explore the ethical, moral, and social implications of AI today and in the future. If a computer gives you all the right answers, does it mean that it is understanding the world as you do? This is a riddle that artificial intelligence scientists have been debating for decades. And discussions of understanding, consciousness, and true intelligence are resurfacing as deep neural networks have spurred impressive advances in language-related tasks. Many scientists believe that deep learning models are just large statistical machines that map inputs to outputs in complex and remarkable ways.