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Dillon Marr Mrs. Mahaffey ENGL 1102-100 18 February 2013

Works Cited

"IBM Watson: Ushering in a New Era of Computing." IBM Watson. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2013.

This article was about the Watson project that IBM is working on. It was a credible source and didn't have a strong bias, as it was only explaining the process and expectations of IBM's own project. This source could be limited because it only explains natural language processing research done by IBM. Cognitive systems like Watson will change the way businesses and organizations think and make decisions. This technology will soon be used widely to address healthcare challenges and make business decisions. Watson can be used by doctors already to assist in treating and diagnosing patients. It can mine a patient's data for facts about family history and current conditions and medication; and combine this information with findings from tests, then output possible diagnoses and the level of confidence for each hypothesis it comes up with. Watson can also use the same method to make business decisions by instantly mining data and making recommendations based on market conditions, recent life events, and available offerings.

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Balbus, Peter G. "How Natural Language Processing Can Solve the Knowledge Retrieval Problem." N.p., 17 Feb. 2011. Web. 11 Feb. 2013

This article is biased because it is selling a product by Invention Machine, Goldfire. It does seem to give accurate information about the topic of natural language processing and how it is researched before the product is introduced. Although the publicity and interest in the field of natural language processing jumped after Watson appeared on Jeopardy, researching in this field is far from new. The current method of finding unstructured information, by performing keyword searches, is often inadequate. This is because a keyword search results in a long list of documents that may happen to contain information relevant to what the user is looking for. These documents are usually recorded in natural language text. Efficient retrieval of this information requires computers to be able to break down the documents into elements that convey meaning on their own.

Yucong Duan, Christophe Cruz, " Formalizing Semantic of Natural Language through Conceptualization from Existence," International Journal of Innovation, Management and Technology vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 37-42, 2011

This seems to be a credible source without bias and was used as a reference by Wikipedia on the front page of their natural language processing article. Both authors of the article are professors at the University of Bourgogne and posted their contact information with the article.

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The advancement of natural language processing is the difference between being able to giving short commands to robots and having a computer fully comprehend a newspaper article or poetry passage. The process for a computer to understand input and natural language is much more complex than producing a natural output.

"Natural Language Processing." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 02 Aug. 2012. Web. 14 Feb. 2013.
This is the main Wikipedia article for natural language processing. The information seems to be credible but it's difficult to tell what information was put up by each of the sources. Natural language processing evaluation is used to determine the effectiveness of how a system can meet the needs of its users. Eventually, the goal for natural language processing is to make these systems as intelligent as people. With the advancement of this technology, computers will be able more able to research on their own and put their findings into natural language.

Bose, Ranjit. E-mail interview. 5 Feb. 2013. This is a professor at the University of New Mexico that I e-mailed after finding his contact information attached to an article of his while doing research. Instead of answering some of my questions directly, he kind of sent me to a few of his different articles, but they were useful sources of information to me. The goal of natural language processing research is to eventually be able to address a computer the way that you would address another person. The ability to do this could be extremely rewarding. Natural language processing research as of now is being pushed to create

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more user-friendly systems, to respond to the growing importance of customer relationship management in business.

Synthesis

Although professor Bose and the team developing Watson at IBM believe that natural language processing technology is ready to transform industries in the near future, researchers like Peter Balbus seem to think its development may slow down when programmers run into certain predicted problems. When looking into the IBM Watson project, it seems to be the most advanced natural language processing system today, as far as its ability to assist with tasks in real-world situations. Watson is being used in the healthcare industry by helping organizations to "use and analyze all available data to improve patient outcomes while also making processes more efficient" (IBM Watson). IBM is also putting this technology to work in other areas like finance, and states that these advancements are "just the beginning of a new way of thinking about ways that technology can help us live and work better"(IBM Watson). All of my sources throughout my research seem to agree that the main uses of this natural language processing technology are currently information retrieval, knowledge acquisition, and language translation. Experts all agree on the incredible potential that the advancement of this technology holds. The only room for bias in my sources is how researches see the future development of this technology. These were all professional sources that seemed to have the same understanding of natural language processing as it is today. It seems like research in this field is getting ready to

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advance exponentially, faster than ever before. It's a challenge to tell what direction this technology will be applied most successfully, and the difference in these sources is just opposing predictions of where researchers will take this technology.