[_bxg1]

It gets even harder than that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winograd_Schema_Challenge

For example:

"The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they advocated violence."

Which party is "they"? There is no lexical information that can possibly answer this question. It depends entirely on an actual understanding of what "city councilmen" and "demonstrators" (in the context of city councilmen and permits!) are, and which one would be more likely to be advocating violence (and in which case that would lead to a permit denial).

Background: Until recently I worked at a symbolic AI company who was tackling this problem. I myself didn't work on this problem directly, but I became 100% convinced that their approach, while a long shot, was the only conceivable way of solving it in a fully generalized way.

[eezurr]

Another fun sentence is "I never said she stole my money". It has 7 different meanings depending on which word is stressed/emphasized. Was about to type it all but DDG'd this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/64ae8h/i...

[chx]

It gets even worse: "The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they advocated peace." the meaning of this sentence in 1968 is different than in 2020!

[6510]

And then there are those who are able to say things that [intentionally] have different meaning to different audience members.

[animalCrax0rz]

Totally. The general problem is indeed difficult to solve, but I've seen lots of great work in this area.