Natural Language Processing

I was discussing a possible R&D programme with my colleagues. We did a litt brainstorming and top of the chart item came out to be natural language processing. No wonder it was top of the mind issue for many of my colleagues. It is such a complex area to investigate. Computer implementation of comprehension, learning and the synthesizing natuarl languge is so tough for computers. It is because we derive so much information from body language the tone and inflexions used by the speaker, a lot of contextual information. These contextual stuff may even be unspoken and lot of it is something we pick up on our way in growing up!

However, human babies pick up these skills so quickly and so well. I is the learning abilituies of us human being that makes it so easy to learn these skils. Same goes for writing comprehension as well as actual writing. Humans do it so easily all the time, yet it is so tough for machines. The CAPTCHA used everywhere beats a program most of the time. Yet, one look and you are able to read the CAPTCHA letter/ numbers presented to you!