Natural Language Processing: Parsing Through The Hype
We've heard a lot about natural language tools and interfaces over the past several years--Google's Translate, IBM's Watson, Apple's Siri--but what's the true state of the art once we've parsed the fine print and extracted the key ideas? Takeaways from this talk: • Natural language understanding remains a monumental challenge because computers typically lack the situational context and world knowledge necessary to make sense of writing and speech. • Despite the hype about big data driven machine learning techniques, these challenges have not been meaningfully addressed by new technologies. • There are, however, a handful of interesting (and even useful) tasks that NLP technology is currently capable of tackling effectively.
