• Ulm University in Germany and SpeechCycle parter to develop novel natural language VXML solutions.
• German semgine GmbH secures capital for improved Web3.0 applications, including market-specific, such as biomedical knowledge.
• Berlin-based Lautmaler VUI-design and speech technology experts go online.

Also some attention on language-technology-related search engine news:

• Red Herring roundup of Semantic Technology Conference last month.
• Google adds multilingual search capacity using Google Translate.
• Some speculation on whether video advertisers with enhanced NLP capacities are next in Googles acquisition cross-hairs.

• Article providing roundup of some semantic web solutions.
• InQuira executive to discuss benefits of NLP for search engine optimization.

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?