The Total Economic Impact™ of IBM Watson Natural Language Processing (NLP) Solutions

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

The Total Economic Impact™ of IBM Watson Natural Language Processing (NLP) Solutions The Total Economic Impact™ Of IBM Watson Natural Language Processing (NLP) Solutions Cost Savings And Business Benefits Enabled By IBM Watson Natural Language Processing (NLP) Solutions FEBRUARY 2021 A FORRESTER TOTAL ECONOMIC IMPACT™ STUDY COMMISSIONED BY IBM Table Of Contents Consulting Team: Sarah Musto Connor Maguire Executive Summary ................................................. 1 Knowledge Worker Definition ................................. 5 Key Challenges ...................................................... 5 IBM Natural Language Processing Solutions ........ 6 Composite Organization ......................................... 7 Analysis Of Benefits ................................................ 8 Knowledge Worker Productivity ............................. 8 Incremental Profit ................................................. 10 Prior Tool Cost Avoidance.................................... 11 Unquantified Benefits ........................................... 12 Flexibility ............................................................... 12 Analysis Of Costs .................................................. 14 IBM License Costs ............................................... 14 Use Case Development And Management .......... 15 User Training ........................................................ 16 Financial Summary ................................................ 18 Appendix A: Total Economic Impact ................... 19 Appendix B: Supplemental Material .................... 20 Appendix C: Endnotes .......................................... 20 ABOUT FORRESTER CONSULTING Forrester Consulting provides independent and objective research-based consulting to help leaders succeed in their organizations. For more information, visit forrester.com/consulting. © 2021, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®, Technographics®, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. THE TOTAL ECONOMIC IMPACT™ OF IBM WATSON NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING (NLP) SOLUTIONS Executive Summary Knowledge workers need fast access to information. Given the voluminous amount of data stored by enterprises, often in disparate systems, as well as the complex documents that knowledge workers must peruse, finding this information is often akin to searching for a needle in a haystack. Enterprises can leverage natural language processing (NLP) solutions that include cognitive search, text analytics, and machine learning capabilities to help knowledge workers make faster and smarter decisions. Enterprises can benefit by collecting and storing vast amounts of unstructured data, but what is the true KEY STATISTICS value of this data and its insights if both are difficult to find and understand? Natural language processing (NLP) solutions can help organizations turn unstructured data into insights and make information easy for customers and knowledge workers to access and understand, improving knowledge worker Return on investment (ROI) Net present value (NPV) efficiency, boosting business growth, and increasing 383% $4.86M knowledge worker and customer satisfaction. Intelligent search solutions — also referred to as AI- powered search, enterprise search, or cognitive Text analysis solutions, like IBM Natural Language search — like IBM Watson Discovery, deliver Understanding, extract metadata from text (such as information, such as factoids, passages, and tables, keywords, concepts, and sentiment) and transform it from within enterprise content (such as contracts, into actionable insights. Organizations can use these RFPs, and technical manuals) in response to user tools to interpret customer feedback, optimize queries. Unlike traditional search tools, organizations marketing efforts, quickly understand current events, can train Watson Discovery to understand the and analyze the latest market data at scale. domain-specific structure of documents, linguistic semantics, intent, and context so query responses IBM commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a include the most relevant and accurate answers. Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises Additionally, Watson Discovery includes the ability to may realize by deploying the IBM Watson Natural mine content — also referred to as content mining, Language Processing (NLP) portfolio of solutions, text analytics, or texting mining — that identifies which includes IBM Watson Discovery and IBM trends, patterns, and anomalies in real time and/or Watson Natural Language Understanding. The from historical data. Organizations can use tools like purpose of this study is to provide readers with a Watson Discovery to augment knowledge workers’ framework to evaluate the potential financial impact intelligence and their efficiency in searching through of implementing these solutions. complex documents, providing self-service access to common questions, and surfacing expert advice to them while interacting with customers. THE TOTAL ECONOMIC IMPACT™ OF IBM WATSON NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING (NLP) SOLUTIONS 1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks of this investment, Forrester interviewed four customers Annual increase in revenue with experience using the IBM NLP solutions, which generated by workers using include both Watson Discovery and Watson Natural IBM NLP tools Language Understanding. For the purposes of this study, Forrester aggregated the experiences of the 5% interviewed customers and combined the results into a single composite organization. Unquantified benefits. Benefits that are not quantified for this study include: KEY FINDINGS • The accuracy and speed of results delivered Quantified benefits. Risk-adjusted present value via the IBM NLP solutions increase work (PV) quantified benefits include: quality. Organizations’ NLP applications enable knowledge workers to review a higher volume of • Knowledge workers that previously spent documents in a similar time frame, increasing the 20% of their time on text analysis/search quality and thoroughness of their work. tasks reduce that time by 50%. The IBM NLP solutions help knowledge workers more quickly • Applications built with IBM NLP solutions find important information within large documents improve knowledge worker and customer and across many documents, increasing their satisfaction. By providing applications that can efficiency in these tasks by 50% and enabling streamline information-gathering and search them to focus on delivering a higher quality and processes, the frustration that’s associated with higher volume of work. these formerly time-intensive tasks is reduced. Costs. Risk-adjusted PV costs include: Reduction in time spent on • IBM license costs. The interviewed information-gathering tasks organizations incurred license costs for the IBM solutions used in their internal NLP applications. 50% • Developer and subject matter expert (SME) time to build and train the organizations’ NLP • Legacy tools can be replaced by the IBM NLP applications. Developers spend time building solutions, saving $150,000 per year. the NLP application before its release, and they Traditional commercial or homegrown text provide application maintenance on an ongoing analytics or search tools are replaced by the basis. SMEs help to train the application both applications built using the IBM NLP solutions. before its release and with ongoing feedback. • The efficiency and accuracy of IBM NLP tools • Training for the NLP application users. deliver an additional 5% in business growth Knowledge workers who use and benefit from the per year. Whether its repurposing staff time for NLP applications spend 2 hours on training. more valuable work or leveraging efficiencies to The analysis found that a composite organization keep prices competitive, organizations see experiences benefits of $6.13M over three years additional growth in parts of the business where versus costs of $1.27M, adding up to a net present their IBM NLP solutions are used. value (NPV) of $4.86M and an ROI of 383%. THE TOTAL ECONOMIC IMPACT™ OF IBM WATSON NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING (NLP) SOLUTIONS 2 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ROI BENEFITS PV NPV PAYBACK 383% $6.13M $4.86M 13 months Benefits (Three-Year) Knowledge worker productivity $3.3M Incremental profit $2.5M Prior tool cost avoidance $289.6K THE TOTAL ECONOMIC IMPACT™ OF IBM WATSON NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING (NLP) SOLUTIONS 3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY TEI FRAMEWORK AND METHODOLOGY From the information provided in the interviews, DUE DILIGENCE Interviewed IBM stakeholders and Forrester Forrester constructed a Total Economic Impact™ analysts to gather data relative to two IBM NLP framework for those organizations considering an investment in IBM Watson Natural Language solutions. Processing (NLP) solutions. CUSTOMER INTERVIEWS The objective of the framework is to identify the cost, Interviewed four decision-makers at benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect the organizations using the IBM NLP solutions to investment decision. Forrester took a multistep obtain data with respect to costs, benefits, and approach to evaluate the impact that the IBM NLP risks. solutions can have on an organization. COMPOSITE ORGANIZATION Designed a composite organization based on characteristics
Recommended publications
  • What the Neurocognitive Study of Inner Language Reveals About Our Inner Space Hélène Loevenbruck
    What the neurocognitive study of inner language reveals about our inner space Hélène Loevenbruck To cite this version: Hélène Loevenbruck. What the neurocognitive study of inner language reveals about our inner space. Epistémocritique, épistémocritique : littérature et savoirs, 2018, Langage intérieur - Espaces intérieurs / Inner Speech - Inner Space, 18. hal-02039667 HAL Id: hal-02039667 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02039667 Submitted on 20 Sep 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Preliminary version produced by the author. In Lœvenbruck H. (2008). Épistémocritique, n° 18 : Langage intérieur - Espaces intérieurs / Inner Speech - Inner Space, Stéphanie Smadja, Pierre-Louis Patoine (eds.) [http://epistemocritique.org/what-the-neurocognitive- study-of-inner-language-reveals-about-our-inner-space/] - hal-02039667 What the neurocognitive study of inner language reveals about our inner space Hélène Lœvenbruck Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Laboratoire de Psychologie et NeuroCognition (LPNC), UMR 5105, 38000, Grenoble France Abstract Our inner space is furnished, and sometimes even stuffed, with verbal material. The nature of inner language has long been under the careful scrutiny of scholars, philosophers and writers, through the practice of introspection. The use of recent experimental methods in the field of cognitive neuroscience provides a new window of insight into the format, properties, qualities and mechanisms of inner language.
    [Show full text]
  • CNS 2014 Program
    Cognitive Neuroscience Society 21st Annual Meeting, April 5-8, 2014 Marriott Copley Place Hotel, Boston, Massachusetts 2014 Annual Meeting Program Contents 2014 Committees & Staff . 2 Schedule Overview . 3 . Keynotes . 5 2014 George A . Miller Awardee . 6. Distinguished Career Contributions Awardee . 7 . Young Investigator Awardees . 8 . General Information . 10 Exhibitors . 13 . Invited-Symposium Sessions . 14 Mini-Symposium Sessions . 18 Poster Schedule . 32. Poster Session A . 33 Poster Session B . 66 Poster Session C . 98 Poster Session D . 130 Poster Session E . 163 Poster Session F . 195 . Poster Session G . 227 Poster Topic Index . 259. Author Index . 261 . Boston Marriott Copley Place Floorplan . 272. A Supplement of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience Cognitive Neuroscience Society c/o Center for the Mind and Brain 267 Cousteau Place, Davis, CA 95616 ISSN 1096-8857 © CNS www.cogneurosociety.org 2014 Committees & Staff Governing Board Mini-Symposium Committee Roberto Cabeza, Ph.D., Duke University David Badre, Ph.D., Brown University (Chair) Marta Kutas, Ph.D., University of California, San Diego Adam Aron, Ph.D., University of California, San Diego Helen Neville, Ph.D., University of Oregon Lila Davachi, Ph.D., New York University Daniel Schacter, Ph.D., Harvard University Elizabeth Kensinger, Ph.D., Boston College Michael S. Gazzaniga, Ph.D., University of California, Gina Kuperberg, Ph.D., Harvard University Santa Barbara (ex officio) Thad Polk, Ph.D., University of Michigan George R. Mangun, Ph.D., University of California,
    [Show full text]
  • Talking to Computers in Natural Language
    feature Talking to Computers in Natural Language Natural language understanding is as old as computing itself, but recent advances in machine learning and the rising demand of natural-language interfaces make it a promising time to once again tackle the long-standing challenge. By Percy Liang DOI: 10.1145/2659831 s you read this sentence, the words on the page are somehow absorbed into your brain and transformed into concepts, which then enter into a rich network of previously-acquired concepts. This process of language understanding has so far been the sole privilege of humans. But the universality of computation, Aas formalized by Alan Turing in the early 1930s—which states that any computation could be done on a Turing machine—offers a tantalizing possibility that a computer could understand language as well. Later, Turing went on in his seminal 1950 article, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” to propose the now-famous Turing test—a bold and speculative method to evaluate cial intelligence at the time. Daniel Bo- Figure 1). SHRDLU could both answer whether a computer actually under- brow built a system for his Ph.D. thesis questions and execute actions, for ex- stands language (or more broadly, is at MIT to solve algebra word problems ample: “Find a block that is taller than “intelligent”). While this test has led to found in high-school algebra books, the one you are holding and put it into the development of amusing chatbots for example: “If the number of custom- the box.” In this case, SHRDLU would that attempt to fool human judges by ers Tom gets is twice the square of 20% first have to understand that the blue engaging in light-hearted banter, the of the number of advertisements he runs, block is the referent and then perform grand challenge of developing serious and the number of advertisements is 45, the action by moving the small green programs that can truly understand then what is the numbers of customers block out of the way and then lifting the language in useful ways remains wide Tom gets?” [1].
    [Show full text]
  • Revealing the Language of Thought Brent Silby 1
    Revealing the Language of Thought Brent Silby 1 Revealing the Language of Thought An e-book by BRENT SILBY This paper was produced at the Department of Philosophy, University of Canterbury, New Zealand Copyright © Brent Silby 2000 Revealing the Language of Thought Brent Silby 2 Contents Abstract Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Thinking Sentences 1. Preliminary Thoughts 2. The Language of Thought Hypothesis 3. The Map Alternative 4. Problems with Mentalese Chapter 3: Installing New Technology: Natural Language and the Mind 1. Introduction 2. Language... what's it for? 3. Natural Language as the Language of Thought 4. What can we make of the evidence? Chapter 4: The Last Stand... Don't Replace The Old Code Yet 1. The Fight for Mentalese 2. Pinker's Resistance 3. Pinker's Continued Resistance 4. A Concluding Thought about Thought Chapter 5: A Direction for Future Thought 1. The Review 2. The Conclusion 3. Expanding the mind beyond the confines of the biological brain References / Acknowledgments Revealing the Language of Thought Brent Silby 3 Abstract Language of thought theories fall primarily into two views. The first view sees the language of thought as an innate language known as mentalese, which is hypothesized to operate at a level below conscious awareness while at the same time operating at a higher level than the neural events in the brain. The second view supposes that the language of thought is not innate. Rather, the language of thought is natural language. So, as an English speaker, my language of thought would be English. My goal is to defend the second view.
    [Show full text]
  • Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Requirements Engineering: a Systematic Mapping Study
    Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Requirements Engineering: A Systematic Mapping Study Liping Zhao† Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom, [email protected] Waad Alhoshan Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom, [email protected] Alessio Ferrari Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione "A. Faedo" (CNR-ISTI), Pisa, Italy, [email protected] Keletso J. Letsholo Faculty of Computer Information Science, Higher Colleges of Technology, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, [email protected] Muideen A. Ajagbe Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom, [email protected] Erol-Valeriu Chioasca Exgence Ltd., CORE, Manchester, United Kingdom, [email protected] Riza T. Batista-Navarro Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom, [email protected] † Corresponding author. Context: NLP4RE – Natural language processing (NLP) supported requirements engineering (RE) – is an area of research and development that seeks to apply NLP techniques, tools and resources to a variety of requirements documents or artifacts to support a range of linguistic analysis tasks performed at various RE phases. Such tasks include detecting language issues, identifying key domain concepts and establishing traceability links between requirements. Objective: This article surveys the landscape of NLP4RE research to understand the state of the art and identify open problems. Method: The systematic mapping study approach is used to conduct this survey, which identified 404 relevant primary studies and reviewed them according to five research questions, cutting across five aspects of NLP4RE research, concerning the state of the literature, the state of empirical research, the research focus, the state of the practice, and the NLP technologies used.
    [Show full text]
  • Detecting Politeness in Natural Language by Michael Yeomans, Alejandro Kantor, Dustin Tingley
    CONTRIBUTED RESEARCH ARTICLES 489 The politeness Package: Detecting Politeness in Natural Language by Michael Yeomans, Alejandro Kantor, Dustin Tingley Abstract This package provides tools to extract politeness markers in English natural language. It also allows researchers to easily visualize and quantify politeness between groups of documents. This package combines and extends prior research on the linguistic markers of politeness (Brown and Levinson, 1987; Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al., 2013; Voigt et al., 2017). We demonstrate two applications for detecting politeness in natural language during consequential social interactions— distributive negotiations, and speed dating. Introduction Politeness is a universal dimension of human communication (Goffman, 1967; Lakoff, 1973; Brown and Levinson, 1987). In practically all settings, a speaker can choose to be more or less polite to their audience, and this can have consequences for the speakers’ social goals. Politeness is encoded in a discrete and rich set of linguistic markers that modify the information content of an utterance. Sometimes politeness is an act of commission (for example, saying “please” and “thank you”) <and sometimes it is an act of omission (for example, declining to be contradictory). Furthermore, the mapping of politeness markers often varies by culture, by context (work vs. family vs. friends), by a speaker’s characteristics (male vs. female), or the goals (buyer vs. seller). Many branches of social science might be interested in how (and when) people express politeness to one another, as one mechanism by which social co-ordination is achieved. The politeness package is designed to make it easier to detect politeness in English natural language, by quantifying relevant characteristics of polite speech, and comparing them to other data about the speaker.
    [Show full text]
  • Natural Language Processing
    Natural Language Processing Liz Liddy (lead), Eduard Hovy, Jimmy Lin, John Prager, Dragomir Radev, Lucy Vanderwende, Ralph Weischedel This report is one of five reports that were based on the MINDS workshops, led by Donna Harman (NIST) and sponsored by Heather McCallum-Bayliss of the Disruptive Technology Office of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's Office of Science and Technology (ODNI/ADDNI/S&T/DTO). To find the rest of the reports, and an executive overview, please see http://www.itl.nist.gov/iaui/894.02/minds.html. Historic Paradigm Shifts or Shift-Enablers A series of discoveries and developments over the past years has resulted in major shifts in the discipline of Natural Language Processing. Some have been more influential than others, but each is recognizable today as having had major impact, although this might not have been seen at the time. Some have been shift-enablers, rather than actual shifts in methods or approaches, but these have caused as major a change in how the discipline accomplishes its work. Very early on in the emergence of the field of NLP, there were demonstrations that NLP could develop operational systems with real levels of linguistic processing, in truly end-to-end (although toy) systems. These included SHRDLU by Winograd (1971) and LUNAR by Woods (1970). Each could accomplish a specific task — manipulating blocks in the blocks world or answering questions about samples from the moon. They were able to accomplish their limited goals because they included all the levels of language processing in their interactions with humans, including morphological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, discourse and pragmatic.
    [Show full text]
  • “Linguistic Analysis” As a Misnomer, Or, Why Linguistics Is in a State of Permanent Crisis
    Alexander Kravchenko Russia, Baikal National University of Economics and Law, Irkutsk “Linguistic Analysis” as a Misnomer, or, Why Linguistics is in a State of Permanent Crisis Key words: methodology, written-language bias, biology of language, consensual domain, language function Ключевые слова: методология, письменноязыковая предвзятость, биология языка, консенсуальная область, функция языка Аннотация Показывается ошибочность общепринятого понятия лингвистического анализа как анализа естественного языка. Следствием соссюровского структурализма и фило- софии объективного реализма является взгляд на язык как на вещь (код) – систему знаков, используемых как инструмент для коммуникации, под которой понимается обмен информацией. При таком подходе анализ в традиционной лингвистике пред- ставляет собой анализ вещей – письменных слов, предложений, текстов; все они являются культурными артефактами и не принадлежат сфере естественного языка как видоспецифичного социального поведения, биологическая функция которого состоит в ориентировании себя и других в когнитивной области взаимодействий. До тех пор, пока наукой не будет отвергнута кодовая модель языка, лингвистический анализ будет продолжать обслуживать языковой миф, удерживая лингвистику в со- стоянии перманентного кризиса. 1. Th e problem with linguistics as a science There is a growing feeling of uneasiness in the global community of linguists about the current state of linguistics as a science. Despite a lot of academic activity in the fi eld, and massive research refl ected in the ever growing number of publications related to the study of the various aspects of language, there hasn’t been a major breakthrough in the explorations of language as a unique endowment of humans. 26 Alexander Kravchenko Numerous competing theoretical frameworks and approaches in linguistic re- search continue to obscure the obvious truth that there is very little understanding of language as a phenomenon which sets humans apart from all other known biological species.
    [Show full text]
  • Natural Language Processing and Language Learning
    To appear 2012 in Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, edited by Carol A. Chapelle. Wiley Blackwell Natural Language Processing and Language Learning Detmar Meurers Universität Tübingen [email protected] As a relatively young field of research and development started by work on cryptanalysis and machine translation around 50 years ago, Natural Language Processing (NLP) is concerned with the automated processing of human language. It addresses the analysis and generation of written and spoken language, though speech processing is often regarded as a separate subfield. NLP emphasizes processing and applications and as such can be seen as the applied side of Computational Linguistics, the interdisciplinary field of research concerned with for- mal analysis and modeling of language and its applications at the intersection of Linguistics, Computer Science, and Psychology. In terms of the language aspects dealt with in NLP, traditionally lexical, morphological and syntactic aspects of language were at the center of attention, but aspects of meaning, discourse, and the relation to the extra-linguistic context have become increasingly prominent in the last decade. A good introduction and overview of the field is provided in Jurafsky & Martin (2009). This article explores the relevance and uses of NLP in the context of language learning, focusing on written language. As a concise characterization of this emergent subfield, the discussion will focus on motivating the relevance, characterizing the techniques, and delin- eating the uses of NLP; more historical background and discussion can be found in Nerbonne (2003) and Heift & Schulze (2007). One can distinguish two broad uses of NLP in this context: On the one hand, NLP can be used to analyze learner language, i.e., words, sentences, or texts produced by language learners.
    [Show full text]
  • LDL-2014 3Rd Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics
    3rd Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics: Multilingual Knowledge Resources and Natural Language Processing Workshop Programme 08:30 - 09:00 – Opening and Introduction by Workshop Chair(s) 09:00 – 10:00 – Invited Talk Piek Vossen, The Collaborative Inter-Lingual-Index for harmonizing wordnets 10:00 – 10:30 – Session 1: Modeling Lexical-Semantic Resources with lemon Andon Tchechmedjiev, Gilles Sérasset, Jérôme Goulian and Didier Schwab, Attaching Translations to Proper Lexical Senses in DBnary 10:30 – 11:00 Coffee break 11:00-11:20– Session 1: Modeling Lexical-Semantic Resources with lemon John Philip McCrae, Christiane Fellbaum and Philipp Cimiano, Publishing and Linking WordNet using lemon and RDF 11:20-11:40– Session 1: Modeling Lexical-Semantic Resources with lemon Andrey Kutuzov and Maxim Ionov, Releasing genre keywords of Russian movie descriptions as Linguistic Linked Open Data: an experience report 11:40-12:00– Session 2: Metadata Matej Durco and Menzo Windhouwer, From CLARIN Component Metadata to Linked Open Data 12:00-12:20– Session 2: Metadata Gary Lefman, David Lewis and Felix Sasaki, A Brief Survey of Multimedia Annotation Localisation on the Web of Linked Data 12:20-12:50– Session 2: Metadata Daniel Jettka, Karim Kuropka, Cristina Vertan and Heike Zinsmeister, Towards a Linked Open Data Representation of a Grammar Terms Index 12:50-13:00 – Poster slam – Data Challenge 13:00 – 14:00 Lunch break 14:00 – 15:00 – Invited Talk Gerard de Mello, From Linked Data to Tightly Integrated Data 15:00 – 15:30 – Section 3: Crosslinguistic
    [Show full text]
  • A Joint Model of Language and Perception for Grounded Attribute Learning
    A Joint Model of Language and Perception for Grounded Attribute Learning Cynthia Matuszek [email protected] Nicholas FitzGerald [email protected] Luke Zettlemoyer [email protected] Liefeng Bo [email protected] Dieter Fox [email protected] Computer Science and Engineering, Box 352350, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-2350 Abstract ical workspace that contains a number of objects that As robots become more ubiquitous and ca- vary in shape and color. We assume that a robot can pable, it becomes ever more important for understand sentences like this if it can solve the as- untrained users to easily interact with them. sociated grounded object selection task. Specifically, it Recently, this has led to study of the lan- must realize that words such as \yellow" and \blocks" guage grounding problem, where the goal refer to object attributes, and ground the meaning of is to extract representations of the mean- such words by mapping them to a perceptual system ings of natural language tied to the physi- that will enable it to identify the specific physical ob- cal world. We present an approach for joint jects referred to. To do so robustly, even in cases where learning of language and perception models words or attributes are new, our robot must learn (1) for grounded attribute induction. The per- visual classifiers that identify the appropriate object ception model includes classifiers for phys- properties, (2) representations of the meaning of indi- ical characteristics and a language model vidual words that incorporate these classifiers, and (3) based on a probabilistic categorial grammar a model of compositional semantics used to analyze that enables the construction of composi- complete sentences.
    [Show full text]
  • From Natural Language to Programming Language
    110 Chapter 4 From Natural Language to Programming Language Xiao Liu Pennsylvania State University, USA Dinghao Wu Pennsylvania State University, USA ABSTRACT Programming remains a dark art for beginners or even professional programmers. Experience indicates that one of the first barriers for learning a new programming language is the rigid and unnatural syntax and semantics. After analysis of research on the language features used by non-programmers in describing problem solving, the authors propose a new program synthesis framework, dialog-based programming, which interprets natural language descriptions into computer programs without forcing the input formats. In this chapter, they describe three case studies that demonstrate the functionalities of this program synthesis framework and show how natural language alleviates challenges for novice programmers to conduct software development, scripting, and verification. INTRODUCTION Programming languages are formal languages with precise instructions for different software development purposes such as software implementation and verification. Due to its conciseness, the absence of redundancy causes less ambiguity in describing problems but on the other hand, reduces the expressiveness. Since the early days of automatic computing, researchers have considered the shortcomings DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-5969-6.ch004 Copyright © 2018, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. From Natural Language to Programming Language that programming requires to accommodate the precision with the adoption of formal symbolism (Myers, Pane, & Ko, 2004). They have been exploring techniques that could help untrained and lightly trained users to write programming code in a more natural way, and natural programming is then proposed (Biermann, 1983; Pollock, Vijay-Shanker, Hill, Sridhara, & Shepherd, 2013).
    [Show full text]