What fundamental shift occurred in focus during the NLP revolution around the early 2010s?

Answer

Moving from *what* the user said to *what* the user meant.

The advent of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) revolution, fueled by advances in machine learning (ML) models around the early 2010s, marked a critical philosophical and technical departure from earlier methods. Previously, systems were heavily focused on recognizing specific phrases or scripts—analyzing *what* the user explicitly said. The integration of ML allowed these newer systems to begin statistically recognizing underlying intent and context. Therefore, the focus shifted toward deciphering the actual meaning or goal of the utterance, enabling the system to understand that different phrasings, such as 'I want to check my balance' versus 'What money do I have left in this account?', conveyed the identical user requirement.

What fundamental shift occurred in focus during the NLP revolution around the early 2010s?
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