“Bank” means two things. How does a machine pick one?

Video transcript

The word bank can mean a river edge or a place with money. A word is just one point, so how does the machine choose?

Alone, it can't. Look at two sentences: one about a river bank, one about a money bank.

The word is the same in both. So what changes?

The words around it. River appears in one, loan in the other. Which clue should pull bank toward the water meaning?

River! It points to water, so bank means the edge of a river.

Yes. Meaning depends on the surrounding words. The machine must let bank look at its neighbors and blend in their meaning.

So a word should look at the other words. That sounds like exactly what attention does.