We gave an introduction to the course and the field it is focused on, i.e., Natural Language Processing, with a focus on the Turing Test as a tool to understand whether "machines can think". We also discussed the pitfalls of the test, including Searle's Chinese Room argument. We then provided examples of tasks in desperate need for accurate NLP: computer-assisted and machine translation, text summarization, personal assistance, text understanding, machine reading, question answering, information retrieval.
