I never said she stole my money...

Natural Language Processing is hard. Make no mistake about it.





Here is a good example of the complexities of the English language that came from the Wikipedia entry for NLP:

"I never said she stole my money" - a simple sentence on the surface but is it?

Let's have a look at how this changes with the emphasis of the sentence.

"I never said she stole my money" - Someone else said it, but I didn't.
"I never said she stole my money" - I simply didn't ever say it.
"I never said she stole my money" - I might have implied it in some way, but I never explicitly said it.
"I never said she stole my money" - I said someone took it; I didn't say it was she.
"I never said she stole my money" - I just said she probably borrowed it.
"I never said she stole my money" - I said she stole someone else's money.
"I never said she stole my money" - I said she stole something, but not my money.

We have a hard time figuring out what this sentence means so how can we expect to automate that process. One of the key things that we are doing at Virsona is to try to understand sentences within the context of the conversation. This is how we process things in real life and is a vital component of being able to handle a conversation and understand as best as we can.

I just had a conversation with Babe Ruth who we currently have under development.

I asked him the question: "Who is your favorite teammate?" and he told me that it was Lou Gehrig. When I asked him "Who was your favorite team mate" and he gave me a great answer about how he loved playing for the Yankees. Good on ya Babe - have a bonza day.