Children learn language by observing their environment, listening to the people around them, and connecting the dots between what they see and hear.
Among other things, it helps children establish the order of their language, such as where things and verbs fall in a sentence.
In computing, language learning is the work of syntactic and semantic parsers.
Soon, they could even be used for home robotics.
For example, the robot with the parser can constantly monitor its environment to reinforce its awareness of spoken commands, including when speech is not fully grammatical or explicit.
Over time, artificial intelligence (AI) services have shifted from algorithms that rely on programmed rules and logic — instincts, where algorithms have some rules and take training data to learn through trial and error.