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My search has not been in vain.  The biggest (I am not suggesting that size is the most important metric) list found so far is on none other than AAAI’s site.  You can see it at:

 http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/html/soft.html

 It is a general list of the full spectrum of AI tools–and it is more comprehensive than anything else I’ve found.  The contents relating to natural language processing seems to be good.

Unfortunately, there still is no sense of which tools are best for certain applications, what is highly supported, etc.  I think this would be enormously useful–especially for small teams looking for components that already fill a need. 

So last night I sent Carol Hamilton, AAAI’s Executive Director, a note asking about possibly making a change to the site.  I hope that together we will be able to gin up something useful.

Two other good lists found seem worth mentioning (in no particular order) that are specific to NLP:

• http://opennlp.sourceforge.net/projects.html
• http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=State_of_the_art

More to follow.

- Stu

While at the AAAI Fall Symposium this week, it occurred to me that there may not be a really good, reasonably complete, business oriented open source site for tools that businesses, especially small businesses, can use in natural language processing applications.

To be useful to small businesses, the tools would need to be well written, well documented, and constructed in a way that enabled straightforward interface connections between the various parts.  I started making a list of possible component tools that might be included in such a list.  The list is a draft list of course, but hopefully some of you readers out there will help out and give me some additional, maybe even better ideas.

Draft List of Possible NLP Components in an Open Source Portal for Business

• Parser
• Grammar - context free or context sensitive
• Grammar editing tool
• Training text corpus
• Front end user interface
• Synonym dictionary and editor
• Ontology and editor
• Tutorials and documentation for integrating into applications

So far, I have looked around at several sites including NLUC, OpenNLP, and several wikis and university sites.  Several offer some very useful material, but none seemed to offer the “one stop shop” that I had in mind.

If you have some ideas, please leave a comment or send me a note.  If I can’t find something within a few weeks, then I will start ginning one up.

-Stu

Just got back from AAAI’s Fall Symposium 2007 in Arlington, VA.  It was great to feel back in touch with the AAAI community. It had been too long since I had attended a AAAI event–good to be back!

I was thrilled to give Saturday night’s Plenary Session remarks on Cognitive Approaches to Natural Language Processing.  From two full days of presentations, discussions, and side meetings, I was pleased to see a good amount of progress in the community over the past several years.  Naturally, there remains a great deal of research, development, and work before the real world will have the kind of rich, natural dialog with machines that we see now only in science fiction.  But at least we are making progress.

For more detail, you can find AAAI’s page on the 2007 Fall Symposium at:

http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/Fall/fss07.php

-Stu

Welcome to AGS TechNet’s blog. This is where we will post thoughts, opinions, reviews, and insights into the business areas where AGS TechNet serves its clients. These include software engineering, knowledge engineering, knowledge discovery/data mining, artificial intelligence applications, and Defense consulting.

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Thanks

-Stu

Director of Blogging!