With or Without Meaning? Hype Cycles in Language Technology and What We Can Learn from Them

摘要

Despite its relatively short period of existence as a scientific area, natural language processing has gone through a succession of diverse mainstream research paradigms. How similar are these inflection moments in the history of the research on language technology? What can we learn from that similarity, if any, about the overall shape of the evolution of this field? And importantly, what can we anticipate from this shape, if any, about the future and emerging trends in language technology? — which is the topic of the workshop where this paper was presented. The result of this study is meant to be of help to organize research agendas of centers, laboratories and individual researchers and innovators, as well as to guide informed institutional funding and support for research and innovation in language technology.