Natural Language Processing: Current state and future directions
Ranjit Bose · 2004
The value in being able to communicate with computers by speaking or writing via “natural language” cannot be overstated. Computational linguistics, or work on “natural language processing” (NLP) began more than sixty years ago. A recent study by the Kelsey Group reports that increasing numbers of companies are investing in and deploying voice or speech recognition and processing technologies at an alarming rate to save money by replacing operators and to improve service to their customers. In recent years, the natural language text interpretation and processing technologies have also gained an increasing level of sophistication. For example, generic engines are now available which can deliver semantic representations for sentences, or deliver sentences from representations. NLP technologies are becoming extremely important in the creation of user-friendly decision-support systems for everyday nonexpert users, particularly in the areas of knowledge acquisition, information retrieval and language translation. The purpose of this research is to survey and report the current state and the future directions of the use of NLP technologies and systems in the corporate world. The research is intended to assist business managers to stay abreast with the NLP technologies and applications.