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What Happened to Old School NLP?

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Re: What Happened to Old School NLP?

#11

Post by microtonal »

dschiptsov wrote: post #8

The subtle ideas form the original "Structure Of Magic" books about how we construct out internal representations of reality depending of wording we use has been replaced by industry of coaches and consultants. The ideas, by the way, had been studied by mainstream psychology as the framing effect and the priming effect. In short, our minds do lexical analysis and decomposition sub-consciously, so we could be influenc…

Note: NLP here means Natural Language Processing, not Neurolinguistic Programming.

Re: What Happened to Old School NLP?

#12

Post by psygnisfive »

microtonal wrote: post #10
psygnisfive wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, it's certainly true that these techniques never went away fully, but they've been eclipsed by the simpler techniques. Academic work, especially under the guise of "computational linguistics" as opposed to "NLP", works a lot on this. But the public face of NLP has been pure new-school stuff for a while now. I was more trying to just talk about why the richly structured old school fell from grace, not claim that i…

The rest of the analysis seemed very much to the point. It was an interesting read, thanks!

I try. :) I've written some related stuff on the blog there, if you want more (most of it I've linked here on HN?)

I'm gonna try to write more often, so hopefully I'll keep giving you interesting reads! :)

Re: What Happened to Old School NLP?

#13

Post by microtonal »

lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #2

NetBase ( http://www.netbase.com ) uses this kind of "old-school" NLP (with a large team of full-time linguistics PhDs) augmented with statistical tools and increasingly sophisticated forms of automation. The end product is more accurate and quicker to adapt than the industry is used to. Disclosure: I work in the engineering team at NetBase.

Unfortunately, the website has marketing all over it. The only thing I could find on Google scholar was about how Netbase is doing parsing of Chinese, based on phrase chunking and then extracting dependency relations using phrase chunks.

I wonder if this is true for all the languages, since this is usually considered shallow parsing (and not deep parsing, a word that seems to be in the white papers). Constructing an 'old-school' grammar for deep syntactic analysis (I am thinking HPSG, CG, or LFG-style here) of 42 languages is a very tedious task if you want to get any decent coverage.

Re: What Happened to Old School NLP?

#14

Post by dschiptsov »

microtonal wrote: post #11
dschiptsov wrote: post #8

The subtle ideas form the original "Structure Of Magic" books about how we construct out internal representations of reality depending of wording we use has been replaced by industry of coaches and consultants. The ideas, by the way, had been studied by mainstream psychology as the framing effect and the priming effect. In short, our minds do lexical analysis and decomposition sub-consciously, so we could be influenc…

Note: NLP here means Natural Language Processing, not Neurolinguistic Programming.

Oh, sorry. Too old school.)

Re: What Happened to Old School NLP?

#15

Post by copsarebastards »

dschiptsov wrote: post #8

The subtle ideas form the original "Structure Of Magic" books about how we construct out internal representations of reality depending of wording we use has been replaced by industry of coaches and consultants. The ideas, by the way, had been studied by mainstream psychology as the framing effect and the priming effect. In short, our minds do lexical analysis and decomposition sub-consciously, so we could be influenc…

It's impressive how you responded to an article you didn't read.

Re: What Happened to Old School NLP?

#16

Post by dschiptsov »

copsarebastards wrote: post #15
dschiptsov wrote: post #8

The subtle ideas form the original "Structure Of Magic" books about how we construct out internal representations of reality depending of wording we use has been replaced by industry of coaches and consultants. The ideas, by the way, had been studied by mainstream psychology as the framing effect and the priming effect. In short, our minds do lexical analysis and decomposition sub-consciously, so we could be influenc…

It's impressive how you responded to an article you didn't read.

Why, sometimes we answer questions which pop up in our heads.)

Re: What Happened to Old School NLP?

#17

Post by JacobiX »

The beginning of the article reminds me of the quote : "Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of our speech recognition system goes up." But nowadays statistical NLP systems regularly use syntactic and semantic information as a features in the learning phase.

Re: What Happened to Old School NLP?

#18

Post by dsfsdfd »

I think it's more likely that we will do machine learning to learn the syntactic structure, rather than hand craft these pieces of machinery. For a long time we have tried to create intelligent machines by designing to solve a problem, now at last we are designing machines to solve problems and finding success. I see no reason to imagine that going back to the old school methods, with a layer of the new magic on top is going to be effective as we move to the medium term - in the short term, possibly, but briefly.

Re: What Happened to Old School NLP?

#19

Post by psygnisfive »

dsfsdfd wrote: post #18

I think it's more likely that we will do machine learning to learn the syntactic structure, rather than hand craft these pieces of machinery. For a long time we have tried to create intelligent machines by designing to solve a problem, now at last we are designing machines to solve problems and finding success. I see no reason to imagine that going back to the old school methods, with a layer of the new magic on top…

I think it's going to be machine learning too, just over richer structures. And actually when you need parsing that's what you get together. But few people need real parsing right now. Some things, like meaning, will I think have to be more old school. There's no good way to learn meanings right now at all.

Re: What Happened to Old School NLP?

#20

Post by lazzlazzlazz »

microtonal wrote: post #13
lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #2

NetBase ( http://www.netbase.com ) uses this kind of "old-school" NLP (with a large team of full-time linguistics PhDs) augmented with statistical tools and increasingly sophisticated forms of automation. The end product is more accurate and quicker to adapt than the industry is used to. Disclosure: I work in the engineering team at NetBase.

Unfortunately, the website has marketing all over it. The only thing I could find on Google scholar was about how Netbase is doing parsing of Chinese, based on phrase chunking and then extracting dependency relations using phrase chunks. I wonder if this is true for all the languages, since this is usually considered shallow parsing (and not deep parsing, a word that seems to be in the white papers). Constructing an…

Not all languages receive the "deep" treatment. Eight, going on nine, have full-time linguists working on developing grammars.
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