Natural-language understanding at BBN

Natural-language understanding has evolved from its earliest days in which scientists use an early approach to parsing, to more sophisticated techniques that enable systems to extract information from open-domain text sources to fill data bases automatically. Natural language processing has many potential applications, such as translating foreign-language documents on the Web; automatically routing questions to an appropriate expert at a help/service telephone number; fully automatic question answering; delivering answers to a Web query, as opposed to delivering pointers to Web pages; and automatically filling a structured database with desired information from text or speech sources.