Commercialization of natural language processing technology

Abstract

Successful commercial deployment of natural language understanding (NLU) products requires far more than accurate technology. Although NLU technology is immature even in laboratory systems, we believe the existing technology is adequate for many commercially useful applications. Rather than describe shortcomings of the existing technology, we focus here on the supporting infrastructure necessary for its successful use. We discuss key deployment issues in both the runtime and development environments. As with any commercially deployed software, an NLU system must justify its presence in the overall system. Thus the value added by NLU at run-time must be consistent with its CPU and memory requirements. Similarly, at development time, the benefits derived from NL-enabling an application must be in line with the cost of development. Burroughs, the Unisys predecessor, began its natural language processing research in 1981. The initial architecture of a text processing system was in place by 1986 [10] and was extended to process spoken language in 1989 [4]. Many applications were built internally to stimulate research on the basic system, and to serve as evaluation vehicles [8] and pilot systems for potential customers [2]. In addition, over 50 external sites have licensed the technology from Unisys for their own research projects. In order to realize its strong potential in commercial applications, Unisys initiated commercialization of NLU technology in 1994. The move to commercialization revealed many requirements that were never addressed in the research environment, despite the Unisys system having being used extensively for nearly a decade in research activities. We had to address the fundamental problems of how to integrate NLU technology with other systems to provide usable solutions to real customer problems and