Estimating a Book's Publication Date with Artificial Intelligence

You're probably aware of AI's increasing ability to analyze and synthesize human language, such as the recent controversy over whether a Google chatbot is, in fact, sentient (Google claims -- and I'm inclined to believe -- that the chatbot is just very, very good at recognizing and replicating speech patterns). Since AI is so skilled at analyzing language, I wondered whether it could detect changes in language over time. Could it differentiate between texts written in, say, the 12th century and the 18th century? As it turns out, it can! To build this model, I used natural language processing, the branch of machine learning dedicated to (you guessed it!)