I just came across a news item that linked back to an article on an Isreali company claiming to have “solved the problem of enabling computers to parse natural human language“. Unfortunately, these kinds of announcements are frequently bogus or exaggerated, so I’m putting on my awesome mask of skepticism.

The article on LinuxDevices claims that the company, called Linguistic Agents, was founded in 1999 and doesn’t appear to be a hoax, having been featured in a Forbes Isreal article.

The information on the Linguistics Agents webpage has very limited technicality on what they call “NanoSyntax” technology, and no demos — so it’s hard to tell. This text here had me raise an eyebrow:

Every word of a sentence contains a significant amount of complex information. Words are communicated in a particular order, via sentences. Humans, naturally having the correct decoding algorithms, effortlessly decode messages on a subconscious level. The human brain takes the information a person wants to communicate and packages it into encoded packages – words. That is why accurate understanding of Human Language cannot be achieved using common computer science methods alone. Computers, lacking the necessary algorithms, are unable to remove the encryption and are unable to understand sentences in Natural Language (i.e. English, French, etc.).

Now, I am not an expert on language parsing, but it seems to me they are claiming that the difficulty lies in the grammatical rules; which is odd, because the difficulty lies in extract the correct meaning from sentences. But this text is very high-level, and doesn’t really explain anything.

Another thing that’s odd; why do they say “understanding of Human Language cannot be achieved using common computer science methods alone” ? Does their solution involve something other than computers? That made me raise my other eyebrow.

Or maybe they mean that their solution is an uncommon computer science method, in which case it’s just poorly written. Some of their text is a bit ambiguous, so that might be the case.

LA’s intelligent algorithms break the sentence down to its core argument/predicate structure. The technologies can then analyze the structured data output and extract the meaning. The meaning can then be passed to an intelligent search engine

I’ll be leaving my mask of skepticism on until I get more info.

Related links

• LinuxDevices Article
• Linguistic Agents Ltd. website
• A webpage in the works from Linguistic Agents, possibly a future demo page?

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