By Jennifer Seale

Prepositions play a very fundamental and complex role in the English language. A single preposition can have thirty or more different meanings. Context provides the information needed for someone to discern which of those meanings is intended.

Neuric creates software that discerns the unique context in which a preposition is used and chooses the correct meaning of that preposition. In this blog entry alone, only one sentence does not make use of at least one preposition. Without the ability to discern the correct meaning of prepositions, it would be impossible to comprehend a great deal of the English language.

When it comes to figuring the meaning of a preposition, things get complicated quickly. Especially since the words that go before and after a preposition may have multiple meanings. If the word before a preposition has five different possible meanings, the word after that preposition also has five different meanings, and the preposition itself has 15 different possible meanings, that gives us three hundred and seventy five possible interpretations. And that’s for just one part of the sentence!

Understanding what that one, intended meaning is out of all the possible meanings is just a small piece of the groundbreaking work Neuric is doing.