Google open-sources SyntaxNet, a natural-language understanding library for TensorFlow

Google today is open-sourcing SyntaxNet, a piece of natural-language understanding (NLU) software that you can use to automatically parse sentences, as part of its TensorFlow open source machine learning library. The release includes code for training new models, as well as a pre-trained model for parsing English-language text. The parser, which goes by the name Parsey McParseface and can automatically figure out whether a word is a noun or a verb or an adjective just like your third-grade English teacher, is the most accurate one in the world, Google says, beating out its own technology. So this is a big deal in the world of natural-language research. "The way we evaluate technologies internally is actually pretty different. We care much less about benchmarks and much more about how they impact performance of downstream systems. Our goal is to improve user experiences," Google Research product manager Dave Orr told VentureBeat in an interview at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, earlier this week.