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Natural Language Processing: Past, Present and Future

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Mobile Speech and Advanced Natural Language Solutions

Abstract

This chapter provides a broad discussion of the history of natural ­language understanding for both speech and text. It includes a survey of the general approaches that have been and are currently being applied to the goals of extracting the user’s meaning from human-language inputs and performing useful tasks based on that analysis. The discussion utilizes examples from a wide variety of applications, including mobile personal assistants, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) applications, and question answering.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Hirschman (1989) for an introduction to the first workshop.

  2. 2.

    For simplicity, this example is a context free grammar (CFG) in the terminology of formal ­languages, although normally a syntactic grammar of a natural language would be at least as powerful as a context-sensitive grammar. A commonly used syntax for writing context-free grammars is Backus-Naur Form or Backus Normal Form (BNF), invented by John Backus.

  3. 3.

    The WordNet visualization shown in Fig. 4.9 was created using the Google Code project “Synonym”.

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  1. Conversational Technologies, 1820 Gravers Road, Plymouth Meeting, PA, 19462, USA

    Deborah A. Dahl Ph.D.

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  1. Deborah A. Dahl Ph.D.
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Correspondence to Deborah A. Dahl Ph.D. .

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    Amy Neustein

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    Judith A. Markowitz

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Dahl, D.A. (2013). Natural Language Processing: Past, Present and Future. In: Neustein, A., Markowitz, J. (eds) Mobile Speech and Advanced Natural Language Solutions. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6018-3_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6018-3_4

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