NLP in WinFX (NIXing the NIXes)

This is very, very cool:

“Longhorn introduced a new namespace called System.NaturalLanguageServices in WinFX, though I believe the name will be shortened to System.NaturalLanguage. More information about this can be found in the Longhorn SDK. There are also a number of samples demonstrating usage of this new API like SpellIt and DidYouMean (which I wrote).

It offers the first direct support of Natural Language in Windows. Among its many features it provides are the following:

  • to break documents into sentences and sentences into words (or collocations--which are multiple words that act as one word
  • to provide spelling correction and scored suggestions to mispelled words in a document.
  • to perform inflectional analysis of each word and assign a part of speech to each word
  • to assign a part of speech to each word
  • to automatically perform language detection
  • to work with different languages... I believe support is included for English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese.” [1]

I did a bit of NLP stuff a while back using WordNet, but it was very cumbersome. This looks like a sweet addition to the OS. Talk about computers understanding what you want them to, this stuff is very key. If you haven't realized it by now, the revolution has started.... and it doesn't end with NIX.

[1] Natural Language in Longhorn. Wesner Moise. http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2003/11/natural_languag.html

 

 

2 Comments

  • Actually I doubt that this is part of the OS (or at least hope that it is not). It only needs to be an add-on.

  • No, it is part of the OS. It is part of WinFX. It makes a lot of sense to have it too. It is the only way to make sure that computers can begin to understand spoken / written language and act intelligently.

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