Washington Post has an extremely thought-provoking article about the focus of industry and research on NLP -- A Visual Rather Than Verbal Future. The author claims that the film 2001: A Space Oddyssey has somewhat influenced our goals too much, and that we should rather focus on a more promising visual area. This a great article, which causes people to stop and think. I'm still debating the content itself, but this is the type of stuff dreams are shattered with ;)

this cartoon anime series has this little hacker kid called ed, and ed uses some sortof visual web browser or something along those lines and it seems like she uses software agents to gather relevant links, i think this imaginary web browser is very innovative for instance when watching the cowboy beebop movie .. they showed web pages in big clumps .. you could think this analogous to things that are linked together .. or things with similar subjects..

i think using our eyes rather than words would be immensly beneficial .. just from taking a glance you could see for instance how many webpages (aprox) were linked togehter for instance.

there are so many possibilities with this .. and to think a silly japanese anime show could have come up with such innnovative ideas towards this before this type of article was even posted ..

-fleeky

p.s. cowboy beebop touches on many very interesting subjects .. even if you dont like anime i would suggest watching it

I think the article makes some good points, but I would never discount the value of speech recognition in computers. Sure, programs that we use for work or school tend to work better when they are orgranized visually, but speech is a major portion of human communication.

Rob

I guess the main issue is about our ability to develop tools quickly.

Visual tools may be more reliable much quicker, where as speech recognition is a tough problem.