What is Text?

• This is actually a trickier question than you might think.
• A newspaper article is text.
• How about a text message? email?
• How about voice to text?
• Are all texts the same?
• What do you want from text?
• Is the author telling the truth?



• The key point of these question is that different linguistic objects behave differently.
• In general, simple language (I'll explain later) is easier to process.
• It is surprisingly easy to come up with language tasks that can not currently be done perfectly.
• Think about how many linguistic things a person does perfectly.
• The Turing test is a language problem.