The Past, Present and the Future of Natural Language Processing?

Making our machines understand the language has made significant changes in the field of machine learning and has improvised the various Natural Language Processing models. But on the contrary, it was quite difficult for machines to understand the underlying meaning of a sentence and how it has its importance in a bunch of sentences, until Google published BERT. Let's consider the following statements: He was a good coder but lacked the idea of optimized code. When in need, he has always helped me. Humanly, this sentence has a clear meaning but quite difficult to understand for a computer.