I am getting quite interested these days about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its actual applications. Most is about Deep Learning of course, and an essential element is Natural-Language Processing (NLP) or making sense for the machine of texts or words. This is an essential first stage to allow the machine to then perform statistical analysis of the data and produce all sorts of useful analysis.
I observe that NLP now performs very well in fields where expression is quite standardized and normalized, such as in legal or scientific fields. In particular, applications of AI to legal aspects is really becoming amazing. However, it still has limitations when it comes to analyzing informal correspondence and longer texts. This makes it harder to use AI to make sense of informal messages and data and to use those datasets as a basis for further analysis.
Of course it has improved substantially in the last months and years as any user of Google Translate or equivalent can witness: translations are now more to the point thanks to AI. Still it does not appear to be sufficient to deal with large sets of informal exchanges such as messages, email and other informal communication channels.
When this aspect will be overcome – which will take time and may not be immediately transferable between languages – the power of AI will be much more visible and dramatic than it is now. Let’s watch for progress in this area!
