Making Computers Understand
from the where's-the-demo? dept
The Washington Post is running an article about an entrepreneur who only first touched a computer 10 years ago, but who is now claiming to have created a huge advance in natural language processing. There have been a lot of very smart people working on natural language processing for many years, so I'm a bit skeptical of what this one guy is doing - especially since most of the article shows that the writer was influenced more by who spoke about the offering than any definitive example of how the technology works (or doesn't). I'm all for innovative approaches to "big" questions like natural language processing, but I worry about an entrepreneur who doesn't demonstrate his product - but instead produces lots of people who say "it's really good".
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
I'm also skeptical
Further, how does one prove that two different perspectives are sufficient to understanding a concept? I hope this does not mean that they believe two perspectives are necessary since there are ‘two sides of the same story’. Usually there are more then two sides of the same story and understanding the ‘reality’ and its context probably might take much more than two perspectives.
[ link to this | view in thread ]