Parent links to Yann LeCunns's "Text understanding from Scratch" paper, from 2015, where the authors uses a conv-net, originally build for image recognition to do text categorisation.

The NN techniques falls squarely in the "counting words"-bracket, although this one is actually counting characters.

It is a great paper, with great results, but none of those models therein have an opinion on ISIS, an ability to converse or anything the author of TFA calls cognition.