Language is actually pretty interesting, you know? We tend not to think about it too much, but communication is in many ways miraculous. As a society, we have been able to agree upon a particular set of symbols that can be grouped into structures like “words” or “sentences” to convey ideas as insignificant as yesterday’s breakfast to ideas as profound as the origin of our universe. Even beyond the obvious, there is an even deeper and less discernible aspect of language - “reading between the lines,” if you will. It is for this very reason that teaching a machine how to understand language is so much harder than teaching a human how to. Neural networks, as they are applied to language comprehension, are actually quite simple in their individual parts. But the level of abstraction that arises within the whole network through back-propagation is amorphous and... fascinating. The same sort of emergence is likely how our own brains process language.
I digress. It’s amusing that I’m only really thinking about this because I’m trying to figure out how to enable a computer to automatically recognize phishing emails. Yes, I’m still running with that idea for a final product. But I haven’t completely discorded DDoS mitigation. What my final decision will really come down to is the availability of training and test data for either idea. If you’re confused about what I’m even talking about I’ll just refer you to my most recent mentor visit assessment.