It's something akin to schooling infants in language. Computers are below child-like in their understanding, so we're trying to get them to act like we act with language and get them to automatically learn it. It's not an easy task, adds Dr. Brill, who is also affiliated with Hopkins' Center for Language and Speech Processing.
Language is hard to teach computers.
It's an amazingly dynamic medium. Today, despite the speed, power and storage capacity of most computers, information retrieval can often be difficult or laborious. If a learning algorithm to allow automatic induction of grammatical structure from text, or a spoken language system to access information from a computer, can be fully developed, it will have an endless array of applications. Let's say you want to find references to newspaper articles on environmentalism, published at a certain time, that are negative in tone. You'd start with a key word, like environment, and get an enormous list to wade through.