i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Our class discussion about language translation last week reminded me of the book "English as She is Spoke."  It is a Portuguese-English phrasebook created by first going from Portuguese to French, and then from French to English, the latter step purportedly using dictionaries (literal translation).  The outcome was bad, and funny. 

We were talking in class recently about Google's book scanning efforts in France.  Here is an article on the matter.

 Human Jeopardy contestants impress me, but a computer that can give similar responses, in as little time, would really amaze me.  "Watson" needs to interpret clues, process information quickly, and give correct answers.  It's that first bit that falls into Natural Language Processing, which we'll be discussing in 202.