The Beginnings at Microsoft Research
However, IBM OfficeVision effort buckled under
the
company's stifling bureaucracy, and its collapse threatened
to end Heidorn, Jensen, and Richardson's NLP Project. In a bold move,
the trio jumped ship and moved the project to Microsoft's fledgling
research lab in 1991, becoming the first researchers to join Microsoft
Research (MSR) and the first to leave the prestigious halls of IBM
Watson for the relatively small software company, mainly known for
its DOS program.
To add insult to injury, this move took place at
time
when IBM and Microsoft were going through a very public
"divorce" over the OS/2 personal computer operating system.
Microsoft had decided to abandon the joint OS/2 development effort
in favor a Windows-only strategy. Microsoft's decision was widely
viewed within IBM as nothing less than base treachery, and losing
three top researchers to Microsoft during this period made matters
all the more infuriating.
Hence, Heidorn, Jensen, and Richardson's transition
to MSR was fraught with nasty episodes, such as IBM
locking them out of their offices. The rights to the group's intellectual
property were a real point of contention between the two companies.
Fortunately for the trio, they had placed most of the work on the
NLP Project in the public domain in various scientific journals and
publications. Nonetheless, the trio had to coauthor a book to document
this fact before IBM relinquished its claims to the concepts.
Once at MSR, the trio immediately began recruiting
theoretical and computational linguists, starting with
the team
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members they had originally assembled
at IBM. Bill Dolan, Lucy Vanderwende, and Joseph Pentheroudakis, the
first three recruits, were deemed critical in moving the NLP Project
along - and they possessed sufficient computer skills to pass muster
with Microsoft's development managers. Dolan and Vanderwende had worked
with the technology at IBM, while Pentheroudakis had been at Executive
Communications Systems (ECS), a leading developer of natural language
software.
The NLPWin System
The NLP Group at MSR, growing steadily in number,
strove to make their NLP Project's conceptual modules
a reality in the NLPWin system. This systems conceptual framework
consists of the components shown in Figure 1, with each module in
this series designed to successively abstract the structure and meaning
of the words and sentences within the language.
The NLP Group's bottom up approach to natural
language processing contrasts sharply with the approach
typically taken by researchers in the Artificial Intelligence (AI)
field. AI scientists primarily focus on creating a machine that reasons
similar to a human and on reach this ability to thinking, assume it
is a relatively trivial task to generate a natural language dialogue
with humans. However, after forty plus years of AI research, this
top down approach has shown little success. The mapping between the
abstract concepts found in machine reasoning and the highly rich,
complex nature of natural language is much more difficult than first
imagined. |
