Daniel Lemire's blog

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Toward the Commoditization of Natural Language Processing

3 thoughts on “Toward the Commoditization of Natural Language Processing”

  1. Kevembuangga says:

    Alas this is still grunt work driven by the “competition imperative”, typical of what I criticised as “nifty promising results” for another domain (software) but the basic flaw is the same and has been well stated 25 years ago by Marcel Schoppers:
    “If AI has made little obvious progress it may be because we are too busy
    trying to produce useful systems before we know how they should work.”

    As you say Daniel: Being sane, most researchers work on problem where it is plausible they can make some progress in a few months by working in small increments each day.
    But THIS is “the problem”, not the way to a solution and it stems directly from the rules of publishing (irrespective of the “goodness” of peer reviewing) and from the need for a career.
    Early scientists from Newton to may be somewhere in the middle of XIX century didn’t have so much pressing economic constraints and were able to speculate more freely on abstract questions, not El Naschie way of course, LOL (though… Newton delved in many kooky topics…).

  2. Thankfully, there are exceptions, such as Peter Turney…

  3. Peter Turney says:

    Daniel, thanks for your kind words. My algorithm is only a small increment, as Kevembuangga notes. I believe that science always proceeds by small increments. I give an informal description of the paper here.