Re: Why is NLP such a hard topic?

"Niki Estner" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> I have long been wandering about that question, and did not really find
any
> good answers:
> There are many (profitalbe) uses for natural language processing
(automated
> translation, search engines, spam filters, database querys...), and
lexicons
> (even including kind of semantic information) are available, and yet (as
far
> as I know) there is no really good implementation for natural language
> processing (Think of something like English in BNF).
>
> Why is this the case?
>
> It's surely not because it would be too much work to write down a few
> thousand rules or more (theres money in it).
>
> Can anyone explain me (or point me to information that does) why this is
> such a hard topic?
> Is the number of rules simply too big???
> Can syntax not be analyzed without semantics?

That comes close to it. To put it simply, you cannot separate people's
linguistic knowledge from their knowledge about the world in general. So
writing a program with the same linguistic skills as a human being is an "AI
complete" problem; your program would need to have the same general
knowledge as a person.

> Is some mystical "soul" required to process natural language????
>
> Thanks a lot
>
> Niki
>
>