The practical goals of the field are broad and varied. Some of the most prominent are: efficient text retrieval on some desired topic; effective machine translation (MT); question answering (QA), ranging from simple factual questions to ones requiring inference and descriptive or discursive answers (perhaps with justifications); text summarization; analysis of texts or spoken language for topic, sentiment, or other psychological attributes; dialogue agents for accomplishing particular tasks (purchases, technical trouble shooting, trip planning, schedule maintenance, medical advising, etc.); and ultimately, creation of computational systems with human-like competency in dialogue, in acquiring language, and in gaining knowledge from text.