Natural language understanding (almost) from scratch

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Natural language understanding (almost) from scratch
Adrian Colyer, The Morning Paper, 2016/07/05
This article gives you a sense of where one branch of artificial intelligence is working today. Researchers are testing their neural network algorithms against four standard tasks in natural language analysis:

• Part-of-speech tagging (POS), labels each word with a tag that indicates its syntactic role in a sentence
• Chunking labels phrases or segments within a sentence with tags that indicate their syntactic role
• Named-entity Recognition (NER) labels recognised entities within the sentence. For example, as a person, location, date, time, company
• Semantic-role labeling (SRL) “gives a semantic role to a syntactic constituent of a sentence.” More.

The challenge here is o succeed at these tasks "without needing task-specific representations or engineering." It is often the case that you can tweak the result with a hint here or there. More...