NLP R&D and commercial deployment
Mark Wasson · 2003
Over the past ten years, researchers in computational linguistics and information retrieval have made a number of advances in document retrieval, categorization, entity recognition and other areas. This drew the attention of venture capitalists who provided the money needed to commercialize this work. There have been some successes, but the landscape is littered with failed startups and applications that didn't live up to expectations. The value of NLP research is not based on its commercializability. But for those who seek to commercialize their research, good research alone is not enough.The purpose of this tutorial will be to examine the role of NLP research from the perspective commercial deployment. Specifically, it will focus on issues and concerns that must be addressed to meet the needs of potential customers for NLP technology, customers who are eager for text processing and retrieval solutions, but who often are disappointed with what they find.