I am interested in Natural Language Processing, or NLP. This branch focuses on how computers can process language like humans do. NLP is becoming more and more integral in everyday life. It's applications have started to branch out in to retail and medical services. It's also used in search engines, like Google. You can see how NLP is an important, growing field of AI.
NLP's greatest advantage, in my opinin, is its versatility and diversity. Some of its applications are sentiment analysis, machine translation, and named entity recognition. I think this branch is one of the most important in breaching language barriers for either business applications or traveling in general.
One current weakness is that computers are unable to identify biases in text. This can lead to language models repeating and amplifying social biases that are found in websites. Another weakness is that large language models produce a lot of carbon emissons, around five times as much as a car! It is important to find a solution that is more environmentally friendly.
I would like to make my semester project website centered around research about natural language processing. I have always been fascinated by language, but not very knowledgable about how it plays with computers. I want to learn more about how we can translate our words and machine language to better communicate with each other (meaning people and machines). I think it would be really cool to see if NLP can improved to clean up translation between two human languages. A lot of the time, meanings get lost in translation, and I think that this would be one of the most useful applications of NLP if it is developed further.