Gigaom The Analytics of Language, Behavior, and Personality

Computational linguists and computer scientists, among them University of Texas professor Jason Baldridge, have been working for over fifty years toward algorithmic understanding of human language. They are, however, doing a pretty good job with important tasks such as entity recognition, relation extraction, topic modeling, and summarization. These tasks are accomplished via natural language processing (NLP) technologies, implementing linguistic, statistical, and machine learning methods. Voice response and personal assistants -- Siri, Google Now, Microsoft Cortana, Amazon Alexa -- rely on NLP to interpret requests and formulate appropriate responses. Search and recommendation engines apply NLP, as do applications ranging from pharmaceutical drug discovery to national security counter-terrorism systems.