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Ask HN: Is artificial intelligence/natural language processing a futile pursuit?

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Re: Ask HN: Is artificial intelligence/natural language processing a futile pursuit?

#21
I think it's more than quite a leap to go from worrying about the marketability of your specific idea to asking about the futility of two very broad fields of research.

I work in NLP, my company has a sentiment analysis product. It's a very small part of what we do, and it's focused on a particular application. NLP itself has a very wide range of applications, some theoretical, some practical, some already in use all day long at very popular websites. Two months is a very short time for complex problems in NLP, believe me.

Regarding tech risk, I think you're taking your particular product niche and casting it to something unnecessarily broad. Polarity detection is just one possible task in NLP, which is itself a sub-domain of AI. It can be done reasonably well without using any real NLP techniques even (hence the crowded social media monitoring scene). That paragraph made it sound to me like you are stressing yourself out unnecessarily about 'solving AI'. It's sentiment analysis (which can be a challenge to get right), focus on that.

Regarding market risk, marketing new technology is a challenge for any new technology, and any given startup will have the same questions that must be asked and answered. The application of your idea may be marketable or it may not be, that has little bearing on the viability of AI/NLP. The best you can do is make sure the company has done due diligence and has a plan, hopefully with some market research to back it up.

Re: Ask HN: Is artificial intelligence/natural language processing a futile pursuit?

#22
I'd like to address the market risks:

Did you know, that large retail sites increasingly employ people to post merited positive, and no-merit negative reviews to funnel consumers into a buying decision? And, by economy of scale, they do this in volume -usually massively overwhelming genuine on-site reviews. Working out the impact is left as an exercise for the reader.

Re: Ask HN: Is artificial intelligence/natural language processing a futile pursuit?

#23
I was probably careless when I did my research, but I just found a company that does the exact type of sentiment analysis on Amazon reviews (as I have independently envisioned):

http://techcrunch.com/2008/06/30/pluribo-is-cliffsnotes-for-...

Not sure how to react to this but sigh.

Re: Ask HN: Is artificial intelligence/natural language processing a futile pursuit?

#24

Hi, I have decades of experience with old style AI and a decade of the new kind :-). I specialize in language understanding algorithms and near-pefect sentiment analysis is something I expect we'll be able to do eventually using the methods I've invented. The top level bit to worry about is whether you are attempting to re-do something that is already known not to work. Litmus tests: Are you using models of language…

As a non-specialist, I enjoyed your blog and site writing, thanks for sharing. In particular, your classification of problems and problem domains is compelling, and another confirmation that reductionist approaches seem to be hitting diminishing returns in understanding the world.
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