Expert to Expert: Natural Language and Computational Linguistics

Posted By: Charles | Oct 22nd, 2008 @ 11:34 AM | 59,325 Views | 6 Comments
Ever wonder what it takes to compute language (language in this case refers to what we humans speak and or/write)? From Wikipedia: Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and/or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. This modeling is not limited to any particular field of linguistics. Traditionally, computational linguistics was usually performed by computer scientists who had specialized in the application of computers to the processing of a natural language. Computational linguists often work as members of interdisciplinary teams, including linguists (specifically trained in linguistics), language experts (persons with some level of ability in the languages relevant to a given project), and computer scientists. In general computational linguistics draws upon the involvement of linguists, computer scientists, experts in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychologists, mathematicians, and logicians, amongst others.

Here, we meet some of the scientists in Microsoft Research who work on computational linguistics. The great Erik Meijer conducts the interview. Special guests are: Researchers Chris Quirk, Michael Gamon and Lucy Vanderwende. This is a great Expert to Expert since the Experts in this case are from different domains of expertise (Erik is a programming language specialist. The scientists Erik converses with are specialists in natural language computation, linguisitics and mathematics). This is a fascinating conversation that spans topics from natural language processing to computing understanding (Yes. AI comes up...).

Enjoy!
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#Oct 22nd, 2008 @ 5:31 PM
ChrisStepaniuk
ChrisStepaniuk
Charles,

You forgot to post the link in the show notes Smiley

Cheers!
#Oct 22nd, 2008 @ 11:34 PM
Maddus Mattus
Maddus Mattus
Do, or do not. There is no try. - Yoda
Even more Erik!

I remember wishing for more videos with Erik, but this is beyond my wildest dreams, thanks C9 team!

Nice shirt again Erik Wink
#Oct 23rd, 2008 @ 3:48 AM
elmer
elmer
I'm on my very last life.
The translation website they talked about.
#Oct 23rd, 2008 @ 9:00 AM
Charles
Charles
Welcome Change

http://www.windowslivetranslator.com for translation service. http://www.eslassistant.com for English as a second language (prototype).
C

#Oct 25th, 2008 @ 2:08 PM
JoshRoss
JoshRoss
A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent.
Looking at the speed that children pickup language, I wonder if the exposure to short children's stories ,as a corpus of understanding, assists in this rapid adoption of language.  I would bet that a few thousand exposures to these stories would define the trunk branches, in the forest of perception, better than a million nytimes articles.  I believe this partially because children's stories are strait forward and have minimal dependencies on external context.
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