Annals of Popular Science: NLP Edition

Over at Lingua Franca, Geoffrey Pullum has a series of posts on "three developments elsewhere that seem to be discouraging ... development [of Natural Language Processing (NLP)]." Even if you, like me, are not particularly invested in this topic, there's a lot of interesting stuff about algorithms, such as Google Search and Google Translate, at the core of "developments elsewhere" that do a good-enough approximation of NLP's fully developed version (which is still far, far away).

All in all, a great example of popular science writing.

Here are the posts, in chronological order:

1. Why Are We Still Waiting for Natural Language Processing?

2. Keyword Search, Plus a Little Magic

3. Speech Recognition vs. Language Processing

4. Machine Translation Without the Translation