Digicult Techwatch – Natural Language Processing

http://www.digicult.info/pages/techwatch.php

Digicult is a fabulous publication aimed at the cultural and scientific heritage sectors funded by the European Union. In addition to their newsletter and thematic issues, they produce shorter documents called “Techwatches” that help to introduce a specific field of technology to their readers and draw out some of the implications for the future.

TechWatch 14 concerns the broad field of Natural Language Processing – which can variously include everything from text parsing software, to speech recognition, to automatic translation and knowledge mining. This paper starts out with a broad overview of the field and then moves on to draw out some of the potential uses for the technology. Well worth a read to get a sense of what this truly disruptive technology may hold (though with the caveat that this has long been an area that has over-promised and under-delivered). – SWL