Deep or Shallow, NLP is breaking out
As research in NLP advances one of the things I am looking out for is how the field will be broken into separate problems. Are there some problems which are relatively low hanging fruit and others that we will be scratching our heads over 30 years from now?<p>One thing that I think will be challenging is that language has observer depending meaning. The same statement might have a completely different meaning to someone with a different experience, or made in a different context, or stated by a different person. Games like Chess and Go have observer independent solutions. The winner is the same no matter who&#x2F;what plays the game.<p>Determining the meaning of a sentence is a problem where the real answer depends on observer dependent perspective and therefore will need a completely different way to measure success compared to more &#x27;mathematical&#x27; tasks like Go. Trying to program a machine to account for this kind of personal experience that humans have, as well as for individual differences between people will be quite challenging I think. I also think that the most significant advances will come from cross cutting academic disciplines like Psychology, Linguistics, and Philosophy of Language.