Yes, really. Google is giving developers and researchers access to SyntaxNet, a pretty cool tool that understands and processes the human language we use when we type into a box or speak to Google Now. Parsey McParseface is the English language plug-in for SyntaxNet – it analyses English text into logical syntactic components.

So, Parsey McParseface can explain the functional role of each word in a given sentence. And Google says it’s the most accurate model in the world – which is why it has released the code for it.

It’s a significant boost for anyone trying to get computers to understand natural language, and could be key to the future of artificial intelligence.

It’s hard for computers to get parsing right because human languages show remarkable levels of ambiguity. In fact, Google says it’s not uncommon for sentences 20 or 30 words in length to have up to tens of thousands of possible syntactic structures.

Google says on its blog: “Humans do a remarkable job of dealing with ambiguity, almost to the point where the problem is unnoticeable; the challenge is for computers to do the same.”

But hopefully, thanks to Parsey McParseface, significant progress can be made for developers in resolving these ambiguities.