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Runaway1956 [soylentnews.org] writes:

Google is currently rolling out a change to its core search algorithm that it says could change the rankings of results for as many as one in ten queries. It’s based on cutting-edge natural language processing (NLP) techniques developed by Google researchers and applied to its search product over the course of the past 10 months.

In essence, Google is claiming that it is improving results by having a better understanding of how words relate to each other in a sentence. In one example Google discussed at a briefing with journalists yesterday, its search algorithm was able to parse the meaning of the following phrase: “Can you get medicine for someone pharmacy?”

The old Google search algorithm treated that sentence as a “bag of words,” according to Pandu Nayak, Google fellow and VP of search. So it looked at the important words, medicine and pharmacy, and simply returned local results. The new algorithm was able to understand the context of the words “for someone” to realize it was a question about whether you could pick up somebody else’s prescription — and it returned the right results.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/25/20931657/google-bert-search-context-algorithm-change-10-percent-langauge [theverge.com]

I can't help wondering how this is handled in other languages. Chinese, for instance, where (I've read that) a word might have several meanings, but context defines the word.

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