Cloud Native Night, December 2020, talk by Jörg Viechtbauer (Senior Software Architect, QAware) == Please download slides if blurred! == Abstract: Neural networks like BERT have revolutionized the processing of natural language and achieve state-of-the-art performance in many NLP tasks. One of them is semantic search where documents are found by query intent and not only by exact match. This talk takes us through the history of information retrieval and shows how keyword search has evolved into the term vector model. The desire for a better search led to the development of the first semantic models like SLI or PLSA. We will see how this culminates today in the use of sophisticated deep neural networks that perform nonlinear dimensional reductions and master long-range dependencies. Semantic search has never been as good and easy to implement as it is today. About Jörg: Jörg is a search expert at QAware and uses neural networks for semantic search and text comprehension. He has spent almost 20 years developing search engines based on both proprietary and open source software for enterprise search, eDiscovery and local search - always hunting for the perfect ranking formula.