Dillon Marr Mahaffey Eng 1102-106 26 January 2013

I. Exigence Natural language processing is a field of computer science dealing with the interaction of computers and human language. It is the process of a computer extracting meaningful information from natural language input and producing an understandable output, also in natural language. The challenge in this field is enabling computers to comprehend the way that humans communicate with each other. Cognitive systems are beginning to understand natural language, breaking down the barrier between people and machines. This technology is starting to be applied in the areas of interactive planning, medical advising, and data exploration. Data volume is growing at an extreme rate. These cognitive systems can analyze this data and produce rapid responses to questions posed in human language. Today's systems show a dramatic change from basic speech recognition software, showing a huge amount of promise for what this technology will be able to do in the near future; benefitting countless fields of study including research and discovery, diagnosis, and risk management.

II. Inquiry What is the potential for natural language processing being used in the real world? How is the field being studied by experts today? I would like to find out which fields this technology can be easiest applied to in the near future, and how that will be made possible. I don't have

much knowledge on this topic prior to this assignment, so I'm not bringing and prejudices to this research project; only an interest in the field.

III. Method As far as primary research, I discovered a perfect opportunity when my Computer Programming professor mentioned that there is a new professor here at UNCC that specializes in natural language processing and actually worked on the IBM Watson project that was featured on Jeopardy. Just getting a few questions answered by them would benefit me greatly in researching this topic. Experts in this field have made their findings available and from the small amount of research I have done so far, I can tell there is a lot to learn just reading what they have discovered. I shouldn't have a problem completing my research by 2/13 so I can get my annotated bibliography completed that week. I'd like to conduct an interview this week if possible. On top of the research workshops and reading days we have scheduled, I can find many opportunities to conduct secondary research during the week of 2/3.