NLP Perspective
An interesting cognitive problem
- language is the most “human” communication modality, so it seems impossible to understand human intelligence without understanding how language works
- Turing test looked on ability to communicate in an unrestricted natural language dialogue as the definition of intelligence
An interesting practical problem: incredible extensions to usefulness of computers if problems could be solved in
- speech recognition and understanding (no more phone menus!)
- handwriting recognition and understanding (a PDA that actually works)
- machine translation (electronic funds transfers and more complex multi-national transactions)
- text recognition (intelligent information retrieval)