Roy's Technology Diary

During my tenure at Software AG, I was introduced to the power of XML. To my candor, i was very impressed to see the wide range of problems that XML promised to solve. Especially, to mention the performance power-punch that XML databases unleash when combined with XQuery and REST. A couple of years later, I moved into the consultancy world. Being back in the consultancy world and seeing business systems with my renewed XML-ized eyes (all credits to Software AG Tamino API and tools laboratory), I was highly dismayed to find that business oriented systems seldom use the real power of XML. The usage of XML herein has been more-so confined to defining application configurations and bare minimum transformation to either render interface elements or reports. I agree, there have been a few exceptions to this statement too. After spending quite some years revolting the general underutilization of XML; apparently I found my preferred architecture – i.e. XRX (XForms/REST/XQuery). What is so u...

Natural language processing (a.k.a. NLP) is a stream of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. In theory, it is the most attractive method of human-computer interaction; but as natural language recognition seems to require extensive knowledge about the outside world and the ability to manipulate it, implementing Natural Language Processing has infact been one of the most sought after conundrums in the computing world. This article presents an abstract introduction to natural language processing and further discusses implementing the same to query databases. What is a Natural Language Processing (NLP)…? Natural language processing is the collection of techniques employed to enable the computers to understand the languages spoken by humans. The concept linguistic analysis and processing originated with efforts in the United States in the 1950s, wherein the intent was to use computers to automatically translate texts from foreign languages into English. Since compute...