This is a great blog and it definately deserves more attention. I have added it to my little knowledge base about rules: http://www.squidoo.com/businessrules

One of the nices things is the rule community is still relatively small and people get to know each other sooner or later.

Cheers,

Gene

Re NLP, I think it is a requirement for effective policy management provided its technical limitations can be overcome to a useful degree. Authority took a practical approach with respect to business rules that works well, as evidenced by its customer successes.

Eliminating speech, typing errors, and poor grammar from consideration makes NLP much more tractable. Ambiguity is an exaggerated problem in practice and can be resolved through question (or displaying conflicting interpretations) fairly easily, particularly for sentences that do not run on.

The principal issue right now is the lack of comprehensive, semantically rigorous ontologies with vocabularly mappings. A cross between a standard dictionary, WordNet and OWL would be very useful. Such linguistically-enhanced, semantically rich models are particular valuable when they cover a standard in a large vertical, such as ACORD for property & casualty insurance. It’s not as important for domains with 3 figure vocabularies, though.

Interesting challenges include multi-lingual support and relaxing the noise thresholds (e.g., less grammatical rigor, spelling errors or speech).

There are also issues of caution required of any technology that may take action, but caution may not be critical for query-only applications, for example. This demonstrates that pertinent issues and challenges are, to a significant extent, dependent on your objectives.

Would you please share your thoughts and expereince about natural language processing: its current status, issues, and challenges?

Thanks!

Gene Weng