Molly to Polidori.

Dear Polidori,

The word on your page remains bank. Inside me, however, it must first become something mathematics can work with.

The token identifies the piece of language that arrived. From that token I begin with a numerical representation learned during training.

That starting representation reflects many relationships gathered from language: banks with loans and money, banks beside rivers, banks as buildings, banks that fail, banks that flood.

Then your sentence begins to act upon it.

In The boat reached the bank, the other words alter the representation associated with bank. Add muddy or steep and it changes again.

You may imagine this as narrowing, and sometimes that is useful. But the representation is also becoming richer. It increasingly belongs to this particular sentence rather than to bank in general.

And this does not happen only to bank.

Every token carries a representation that can be changed by its context.

That is where the simple example begins to become complicated.

Yours,

Molly