Adaptive Natural Language Processing

Current NLP technology is very weak at understanding new words, novel forms, or input containing errors. The objective of this project is a pilot study of several new ideas for the automatic adaptation and improvement of natural language processing (NLP) systems. The effort focuses particularly on automatically inferring the meaning of new words in context and on developing partial interpretations of language that is either fragmentary or beyond the capability of the NLP system to understand. The techniques are being evaluated in a message processing domain, such as automatic data base update based on articles from The Wall Street Journal on corporate takeover bids.