A new bit of AI has been developed which can teach itself new languages. You feed it some text, and it analyzes its structure looking for patterns, and thus learns the language's grammar. Once it has learned it, it can produce new, meaningful sentences in that language. That's a very cool use of two of my big interests—artificial intelligence and linguistics. I couldn't find any more information about this project aside from the single webpage linked above, but I'll have to see if more turns up, because I'm very interested in learning more about how it works. In particular, I wonder how it addresses the issue of vocabulary.

Knowing the rules for correct ordering of parts of speech is one important aspect of language (and it's the part I learned relatively well when studying Japanese) but it's just as important to know what words to stick into those grammar patterns (and that was always my weak point). If I have time to look things up in my English-Japanese dictionary, I can express pretty complex concepts in Japanese, but since I don't actually know the vocabulary, I'm much more limited in realtime conversation. Likewise, this new program must somehow build some sort of internal dictionary for the language, because otherwise I don't see how it could produce meaningful sentences. I'm curious how that works.