[Pipet Devel] natural language processing

[J.W. Bizzaro]

Hi Jeff!

I read on the ISMB website that you're giving a tutorial on natural language
processing.  It's interesting to see that, because we've been talking about
NLP for Piper.  Basically, I've been thinking about a text-based interface
that works like a first-person adventure game, where you give text commands to
traverse nodes in Piper and do things with other objects at each node.  For
example, you might say "connect terminal 1 to terminal 2".  And Piper would
respond with text-based verifications of actions.

The neat thing would be to integrate this with voice recognition and speech
synthesis.  Then, because Piper can use multiple interfaces (GUI and non-GUI),
users could talk and see the results of commands graphically.

We're also collaborating with some people developing an intelligent personal
agent called Narval.  They've been interested in connecting it to Piper to
take advantage of the networking and the information stored in nodes. 
Interestingly, they too have thought about using NLP.  With Narval/Piper, you
might tell it to get some information for you, in a very abstract way, and
then have the agent find what it can, possibly even building its own networks
to get results.  You can imagine the uses of this in bioinformatics! :-)

Anyway, I thought that I'd let you know and suggest, if you're interested in
developing an NLP bioinformatics system, that you might want to consider
Narval/Piper :-)

Cheers.
Jeff
-- 
J.W. Bizzaro                                jeff at bioinformatics.org
Director, Bioinformatics.org        http://bioinformatics.org/~jeff
"As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we
should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention
of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."
                   -- Benjamin Franklin
--