Gresham College lecture on text

I'm sure I remember attending an academic seminar called "The Joy of Text" (for younger readers this is play on the name of rather racy textbook that was around in the 70s called "The Joy of Sex"). Text has rather taken a back seat in computer science recently but of course where would be without Google, Bing and Duckduckgo? These are all, mostly, text based systems.

But can a computer write a Sonnet? Or an academic paper? Well to some degree. Although I don't talk about in this lecture, the ultimate test of such systems is to see if they fool humans. Would you believe that that I wrote that paper "Towards the Deployment of the Lookaside Buffer" - there is a clue in the title which is that I strongly disapprove of meaningless capitalisation in titles!