I'm sure this problem will eventually be cracked.
However, experience and the laws of physics teach us that problems and
physical objects roll down walls to the lower energy levels not up walls
to higher energy levels. I challenge any NLP system to understand that
in German you write Home for home page and not StartSeit. As long as
you can find content-expert professional human translators at
5cents/word, you won't have a business proposition, because a free
community effort will depend precisely upon the people who make a living
from translation. OTOH - if a technology solution costs more than that,
it wont be a viable alternative either.
BTW - I hear that organizations like NSA use NLP to listen in on
conversations and translate - but they also have a small army of
linguists to make sense of it.
that's the end of my 5c :-)
Shachar Shemesh wrote:
I'll start by stating that all of my info comes from a close friend, who
is both a linguist and the owner of a small startup that does NLP
(Natural Language Processing). I cannot testify to the truth behind all
of the opinions I am transferring here, but I can testify that I have
seen his technology, and it's fairly awesome.
Danny Lieberman wrote:
Uri,
This is a ripe research area as Orna has pointed out, I might add that
it has been around for almost 30 years with no significant breakthroughs.
According to this friend of mine, it is more precise to say that "there
has been much research on the matter some 30 years ago". He says that
most of the research done was in a field of linguistics called
"Generative Linguistics", lead by one Noam Chomsky. According to another
friend of mine, Chomsky, while reveared by Generative linguistics around
the world, is renowned for having his theories around NLP being knocked
down, one after the other, to which he simply goes out and makes up a
new theory.
I know about four people who deal with linguistics (two of them actual
linguists, one of them subscribed to this list). None of them has any
respect whatso'ever to Generative Linguistics. From the little I know
about what Generative Linguistics is about, neither do I.
The short of it is that the reason that 30 years of research has not
produced any good results with machine translations is that they are
using the wrong tool for the job. My first friend claims that his engine
achieves the same level of accuracy as proffesional engines today
WITHOUT BEING ADAPTED TO THE USED CORPUS. He even claims he has no
particular problems with the standard gotchas, such as the infamous
"Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana".
That's the end of my rant. If any list reading differential SCSI cable
yielding Structural Linguist wishes to add his proffesional view of
things, he is welcome.
Shachar
--
Danny Lieberman
Visit us at http://www.software.co.il
Office + 972 8 970-1485
Cell + 972 54 447-1114
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