New NLP Report from Ovum

New NLP Report from Ovum

Six years after the company’s milestone report on “natural language computing,” a welcome update on the NLP market.

Ovum, the British marketing consultants specializing in IT, has published a new report analyzing the market for natural language products over the coming years. While the title, , suggests a heavy diet of statistics, the report in fact offers a highly digestible buffet of marketing information, company profiles, end-user reports, and background information. The concise writing style and spacious layout make perusing the A4-size report a pleasure rather than a duty.
    Authors Brigitte Engelien and Ronnie McBryde highlight five major applications of NLP: database interfaces, machine translation, contents-scanning, writing tools, and talkwriters. Current suppliers are highlighted, products are discussed, and the prospects for the coming years are analyzed.
    According to Engelien, applications were selected according to the criterion that they handle the processing of natural language at sentence level, and not at word or character level. This explains why there is no reference either to handwriting recognition, a technology which is gaining a high profile with the proliferation of pen-based notebook computers, or to OCR. Neither, added Engelien, did they aim to be absolutely encyclopedic; the appendix on suppliers, for example, was not meant to be exhaustive but rather a sampling of significant players.
    They were strict, too, about separating the technological wheat from the marketing chaff. Engelien: “We didn’t include any of the PC-based translating systems. I think they just give MT a bad name. I simply don’t believe you can build a reasonable machine translation system for a PC.”
    One of the most surprising forecasts made by the authors is their estimation that Talkwriters (speech recognition systems or “dictation machines”) will have the largest share of the NLP market in the year 2000, surpassing natural language database interfaces, which currently have the largest share of the sixty-billion dollar market estimated for 1991.
    From their bird’s eye view of the situation, Engelien and McBryde write: “These [technologies] are the foundations of the emerging language market, which we estimate will begin to take off in the second half of the 1990s. There are still many hurdles to overcome but by the year 2000 natural language will be established in a wide range of application areas. ”At the same time they caution: “Commercial NLP products marketed today all deal with specific tasks and limited subject areas. General-purpose systems are many years away.”
    Natural Language Markets: Commercial Strategies, price UK£ 725.

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