Computers are becoming multilingual -- and NLP experts are in great demand

In the middle of the highway, my father turned to our car navigation system for directions. Before chalking out a route from Calcutta to Santiniketan, the system asked our language preference -- would we want to be guided through the alleys, bridges and villages in English, Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, the list went on and on. We have come a long way since the days when the only way to communicate with devices was via the keyboard or keypad. But how does a computer, or any system built on technology, think, understand, and, in the case of car navigation systems, even speak in regional languages? Artificial intelligence, of course -- one of the most important parts of which is the concept of natural language processing or NLP.