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Comment by lazzlazzlazz | Hacker News Reader

NetBase (http://www.netbase.com) uses this kind of "old-school" NLP (with a large team of full-time linguistics PhDs) augmented with statistical tools and increasingly sophisticated forms of automation.

The end product is more accurate and quicker to adapt than the industry is used to.

Disclosure: I work in the engineering team at NetBase.

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Unfortunately, the website has marketing all over it. The only thing I could find on Google scholar was about how Netbase is doing parsing of Chinese, based on phrase chunking and then extracting dependency relations using phrase chunks.

I wonder if this is true for all the languages, since this is usually considered shallow parsing (and not deep parsing, a word that seems to be in the white papers). Constructing an 'old-school' grammar for deep syntactic analysis (I am thinking HPSG, CG, or LFG-style here) of 42 languages is a very tedious task if you want to get any decent coverage.

Not all languages receive the "deep" treatment. Eight, going on nine, have full-time linguists working on developing grammars.

Cool! The website says netbase supports 42 different languages, but not which languages.

to find out which 42, we'll need to build a computer the size of a planet

awesome! what sorts of things does NetBase do with old school NLP?

Social media analysis of many kinds is our full-time focus right now. It's a rapidly changing field. The demands of customers shift as they become more educated about what to expect from social media and how to push the boundaries of technology.

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