Speech Recognition vs. Language Processing

By Geoffrey Pullum. I have stressed that we are still waiting for natural language processing (NLP). One thing that might lead you to believe otherwise is that some companies run systems that enable you to hold a conversation with a machine. But that doesn’t involve NLP, i.e. syntactic and semantic analysis of sentences. It involves automatic speech recognition (ASR), which is very different. ASR systems deal with words and phrases rather as the song “Rawhide” recommends for cattle: “Don’t try to understand ’em; just rope and throw and brand ’em.” Labeling noise bursts is the goal, not linguistically based understanding. Read more...