In the past few years, high-quality automated text-to-speech synthesis has effectively become a commodity, with easy access to cloud-based APIs provided by a number of major players. At the same time, developments in deep learning have broadened the scope of voice synthesis functionalities that can be delivered, leading to a…

A whistle-stop tour of around 120 NLP start-ups that received early-stage funding in the last 12 months — Funding for AI start-ups in general is booming, and natural language processing as a subfield hasn’t missed out. We take a closer look at early-stage funding over the last year — just over US$1B in total — for companies that offer solutions that are based on or make significant use…

A panoramic look at the past and future of the field, from the Unix Writer’s Workbench to Grammarly and beyond — By Robert Dale and Jette Viethen Automated writing assistance — a category that encompasses a variety of computer-based tools that help with writing — has been around in one form or another for 60 years, although it’s always been a relatively minor part of the NLP landscape. But the category…

GPT-3 made the mainstream media headlines this year, generating far more interest than we’d normally expect of a technical advance in NLP. People are fascinated by its ability to produce apparently novel text that reads as if it was written by a human. …

It took a while, but natural language generation is now an established commercial software category. It’s commented upon frequently in both industry media and the mainstream press, and businesses are willing to pay hard cash to take advantage of the technology. We look at who’s active in the space, the…

The end of the calendar year always seems like a good time to pause for breath and reflect on what’s been happening over the last 12 months, and that’s as true in the world of commercial NLP as it is in any other domain. In particular, 2019 has been a…

It’s now remarkably easy to release to the world a cloud-based application programming interface (API) that provides some software function as a service. As a consequence, the cloud API space has become very densely populated, so that even if a particular API offers a service whose potential value is considerable…

The Natural Language Engineering journal is now in its 25th year. The editorial preface to the first issue back in 1995 emphasized that the focus of the journal was to be on the practical application of natural language processing (NLP) technologies: the time was ripe for a serious publication that…

The law has language at its heart, so it’s not surprising that software that operates on natural language has played a role in some areas of the legal profession for a long time. …