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You Shall Know a Word by the Company It Keeps
The Idea That Taught Machines to Understand Language
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Some of the most powerful ideas in science don’t begin in labs. They begin with sentences that sound almost poetic.
In the 1950s, British linguist J. R. Firth said,
“You shall know a word by the company it keeps.”
He wasn’t trying to build an AI system or invent a new technology.
He was simply observing something profound about how language works, and decades later, that observation became the foundation of how machines understand words.
The Curious Machine
Imagine a computer that knows nothing about human language.
It has never read a dictionary. It has no idea what “apple,” “love,” or “justice” mean. Now feed it billions of words from books, tweets, research papers, and news articles.
The machine starts to notice patterns. The word king appears near queen, royal, throne, and crown. The word apple often shows up near fruit, tree, red, and juice.
