The analyst listens, learns, and decides when to make appropriate interpretations. A major function of interpretation is to accelerate the process of uncovering unconscious material. The analyst listens for gaps and inconsistencies in the client’s story, infers the meaning of reported dreams and free associations, and remains sensitive to clues concerning the client’s feelings toward the analyst.
Machine translation remains imperfect but is good enough for many applications. Early systems used the GOFAI approach of hand-coded grammars that had to be developed by skilled linguists from the ground up for each language. Newer systems use statistical machine learning techniques that automatically build statistical models from observed usage patterns. The machine infers the parameters for these models by analyzing bilingual corpora. This approach dispenses with linguists: the programmers building these systems need not even speak the languages they are working with.
