Machine Translation Without the Translation

By Geoffrey Pullum. I have been ruminating this month on why natural language processing (NLP) still hasn’t arrived, and I have pointed to three developments elsewhere that seem to be discouraging its development. First, enhanced keyword search via Google’s influentiality-ranking of results. Second, the dramatic enhancement in applicability of speech recognition that dialog design facilitates. I now turn to a third, which has to do with the sheer power of number-crunching. Read more...