Linguists, computer scientists use TACC supercomputers to
improve natural language processing
It's not hard to tell the difference between the
"charge" of a battery and criminal "charges." But for
computers, distinguishing between the various meanings of a word is difficult.
For more than 50 years, linguists and computer scientists
have tried to get computers to understand human language by programming
semantics as software. Driven initially by efforts to translate Russian
scientific texts during the Cold War (and more recently by the value of
information retrieval and data analysis tools), these efforts have met with
mixed success. IBM's Jeopardy-winning Watson system and Google Translate are
high profile, successful applications of language technologies, but the
humorous answers and mistranslations they sometimes produce are evidence of the
continuing difficulty of the problem.