AGS TechBlog
A source and journal of ideas

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