Before revision: Language is central to human intelligence. We review recent breakthroughs in machine language processing and consider what remains to be achieved. Recent approaches rely on domain general principles of learning and representationcaptured in artificial neural networks.
After revision: Language is crucial for human intelligence, but what exactly is its role? We take language to be a part of a system for understanding and communicating about situations. The human ability to understand and communicate about situations emerges gradually from experience and depends on domain-general principles of biological neural networks: connection-based learning, distributed representation, and context-sensitive, mutual constraint satisfaction-based processing. Current artificial language processing systems rely on the same domain general principles, embodied in artificial neural networks.