Natural Language Processing began in earnest in 1950 when Alan Turing published his paper entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, from which the so-called “Turing Test” emerged. Turing basically asserted that a computer could be considered intelligent if it could carry on a conversation with a human being without the human realizing they were talking to a machine.
The goal of natural language processing is to allow that kind of interaction so that non-programmers can obtain useful information from computing systems. NLP also includes the ability to draw insight from data contained in emails, videos and other unstructured material. In the future, the most useful data will be the kind that was too unstructured to be used in the past.
Research Proposal
Title: Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Introduction
Let’s look at a quick example of why NLP is important.
When looking at unstructured data, for instance, we may encounter the number “31” and have no idea what that number means, whether it is the number of days in the month, the amount of dollars a stock increased over the past week, or the number of items sold today. Naked number “31” could mean anything, without the layers of context that explain who stated the data, what type of data is it, when and where it was stated, what else was going on in the world when this data was stated, and so forth.
Clearly, data and knowledge are not the same thing.
Purpose:
- To help in the processing of emails for SmartQuote project.