Saturday 10 April 2010

Why machines do not understand human speech

So maybe the dreaded Wikipedia isn't that dreadful after all...

"Now the American Palo Alto Research Centre (Parc) is working on an ambitious project with the aim to take computers' language skills to the next level.

Parc's research on natural language processing was bought by search engine Powerset who combined it with data from online encyclopaedia Wikipedia.

Users can search Powerset with keywords, phrases, or simple questions - the results are aggregated from multiple Wikipedia articles. The aim is to provide more accurate results and answer questions directly."

more on this in the BBC article with the same heading as the one title of this brief post, although an article in BusinessWeek might in fact give more details on the matter.