Have you found any others?

• Software Ali Baba parses medical abstracts, generates visual network or terminology using natural language processing.
• A redux of latent semantic indexing (LSI) for use in search engines.

• Haley 6.0, a business rules management system, allows business rules extraction using natural language processing.
• Uses of voice-enabled wikis.

Web 2.0 seems to be happy with being vaguely defined (delimited may be a better term) and equally a social and a technological movement. Web 3.0 clearly hovers over the idea of the “Semantic Web”, a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, in which richly mark-upped hypertext and data allow for novel more meaningful human-machine and machine-machine communication. Radar Networks (currently in stealth mode) claim to be driving some interesting developments in this direction and are followed closely by those interested.

This has already raised some questions: will content be expensive hand labor or machine boot-strappable, what new privacy policies do we have to live with, how does one separate style and content, what are alternatives to RDF.

Sadly, there’s very little inspiring out there about potential applications.

My question (though not uniquely mine) to add to this: What role will natural language processing play in this (i.e. how “semantic” is this talk of Semantics)? Semantic content in RDF appears to be little more than a means for one machine to tell another who authored a particular book or what are the postal codes in the greater Boston area. Semantics to me is as much about intentions (“Why is web-service A dispensing such information?”) and interpreting such information for the purposes of action (“What can web-service B – or my browser or I – do with it?”).

Perhaps this misses the mark and semantic really isn’t about natural language. But there is a weaker, more real form of this “language and technology” concern: Insofar as semantics is just information, can it be bootstrapped by a machine (perhaps even linguistically informed rather than statistically)?

Thoughts?

• Some electronic dictionary news. Coolsoft Coolexon electronic dictionary features 60 languages, including translation and TTS accessibility features, is only 3.3MB large. Also in the news, Ultralingua and Collins partner to release electronic dictionaries.
• Some business automation success stories using speech recognition.
• Some more semantic search engine-related news featuring ZoomInfo and Cognition.
• Arab language speech recognition market growing.
• Wizzard announces 2006 financial results.

Questions of the day:

• Web X.0 IEEE workshop. What role will NLP play?
• Are GPS navigation systems driving the TTS market (links randomly chosen from recent navigation system releases)?

• CallMiner announces Eureka product for call center speech analytics and QA.
• Envox CT Connect 7 VXML/CTI plattform now Avaya telephony compliant
• Some blogging about the role of symbolic vs brute-force statistics in articificial intelligence, NLP, Google‘s machine translation vision.

• Article about Google statistical machine translation algorithms, mentions success in Arabic (cf. NIST benchmarks finding Google’s Arabic/Chinese->English translation most accuracte.)
• Teragram MyGAD.com search engine launch, employing NLP for improved information retrieval. In related news, a list of top-100 search engines, including more NLP and some audio searches.
• Article about predicive software application for the tourism industry, calls for NLP and other AI techniques such as neural networks.
• Nuance unveils voice music search application for mobile ASR applications. In related news, Nuance ships improved mobile TTS.