Text is one of our main interfaces with computers, and AI technologies allow us to understand text in new ways. Computers can process large textual corpora, including digitised texts from the past, and contemporary scientific articles. Current challenges that our speakers will discuss include emotion detection in dialogue, and the changing meaning of words. The session will consist of two short keynote talks from Professor Sophia Ananiadou, Director of the National Centre for Text Mining, and Dr Barbara McGillivray, Lecturer in Digital Humanities and Cultural Computation at King's College London — both also Turing Fellows at The Alan Turing Institute, the UK's national institute for data science and artificial intelligence.