Text, text, and more text! We are surrounded by textual data. Much of the world’s knowledge is stored and shared by using text in natural language. This has been true since the beginning of human history, when we started sharing knowledge in different languages—first by voice and later, to make it permanent, by writing.
Natural language is the main way in which we interact with other humans. We begin learning it as infants, yet understanding language is one of the most complex tasks a machine can do. Nevertheless, computer scientists, data scientists, and machine learning practitioners have worked hard to make machines capable of dealing with textual data, providing complex solutions that use text to offer advanced features to the final users.