‘Natural Language Understanding’ Poised to Transform How We Work
Written communication will become a less exclusively human task if machines can extract meaning from text
By Richard Waters
In some ways, the life of an analyst working for one of the US intelligence services is not so different from that of many other knowledge workers.
The day often begins with sifting through information, preparing reports that distil and summarise the most important new events. Intelligence analysts have to work with large amounts of data, analysing and synthesising it to make sense of a complex world.
This is the kind of work where software is starting to play a bigger part. Technology from Primer, a San Francisco artificial intelligence start-up, is already used by unspecified intelligence services to read through written material in an effort to identify trends and significant events. The results help guide human analysts to focus on what is important.
The same software is used by retailer Walmart, where analysts constantly monitor a large number of product markets to identify opportunities and risks in the company’s supply chain.
If language understanding can be automated in a wide range of contexts, it is likely to…
