The Problem

1. The Rubber and the RoadIndustrial Perspectives on NLPEMNLP PanelJune 4, 2001David A. EvansClairvoyance Corporation

2. There is not much rubber on the road. Rubber producers may not be good tire manufacturers; they are not good tire salesmen. Why? Vast distance between IP and Markets Real Users  User Models Real Language  Language Models The Problem

3. Ideas Intellectual Property Algorithms Code Techniques Prototypes Lots of Engineering! Technology Lots of Design & Engineering! People Product Market IP vs. Markets

4. Real people don’t use technology, they use information and tools. These must be practical, simple, robust. Real people exist in social/work contexts, typically far removed from technology (and parameters (and the Intelligence Community)). To be relevant, our products must solve the problems people actually have, not the ones we imagine they have or the ones we find interesting. E.g., lots of valuable data is indexed and accessed via controlled classification vocabulary, not free-text terms. But there is little work on, say, translating user descriptions into effective combinations of controlled vocabulary for optimized retrieval Real Users  User Models  Training Data

5. People don’t speak/write in “words”  unigram language models are a cop out Real language manifests dependencies, not independence assumptions Challenge: integrate (meaningfully!) statistical observations with linguistically motivated abstractions E.g., work with term equivalence classes, not terms E.g., discover new multi-morpheme atoms, not new words E.g., solve the problem of combining levels of representation, such as “terms” with “entities” with “speech acts” Real Language  Language Models

6. Pressure in the Market will create increasing demand for new Language Technology CRM, especially Voice  Text ( Voice) Message Filtering (“Micro-Message Management”) Multilingual Text Management There is Some Hope… Overwhelming Problems are Coming…

7. Bad technology doesn’t necessarily prevent a well-marketed system from being commercially successful. Good technology alone almost never insures commercial success. New products almost never can be introduced in a vacuum. (Real products must integrate with legacy systems and social & business practices.) But Remember…