The impact of computer systems that can understand natural language will be tremendous. To develop this capability we need to be able to automatically and efficiently analyze large amounts of text. Manually devised rules are not sufficient to provide coverage to handle the complex structure of natural language, necessitating systems that can automatically learn from examples. To handle the flexibility of natural language, it has become standard practice to use statistical models, which assign probabilities for example to the different meanings of a word or the plausibility of grammatical...

The impact of computer systems that can understand natural language will be tremendous. To develop this capability we need to be able to automatically and efficiently analyze large amounts of text. Manually devised rules are not sufficient to provide coverage to handle the complex structure of natural language, necessitating systems that can automatically learn from examples. To handle the flexibility of natural language, it has become standard practice to use statistical models, which assign probabilities for example to the different meanings of a word or the plausibility of grammatical...