Rohan McLeod <rhn@jeack.com.au> wrote:
Obviously natural language processing must be an extremely difficult problem,
That depends on what kind of processing you want to do and what results you hope to achieve from it. At a deeper level, there are still foundational disagreements about how best to construct a systematic theory of the semantics of natural languages. Important progress has been made in this area over the last century, however, which is very encouraging. (I wrote my PhD in this area).
if Google with all their expertise and processing power can't put a natural language, front end on their search engine.
I suspect they've concluded that their ranking and query analysis algorithms already employ the most effective techniques available. I have no doubt that the designers of Google Search are well versed in the literature of natural languge processing - Google employ PhD graduates in large numbers.
I wonder whether some entrepreneurial start-up company with a new idea; might put together software which disambiguates say short English language search questions via a dialogue; then compiles a complex Google search string, to achieve that result ?
They would have to perform consistently better than Google's own query processing algorithms to be worthwhile though.