This is an interesting story about potentially important technology. The move from parsing single words to groups of words is the latest development in artificial intelligence. This story focuses on one group of computer scientists working on this problem in one way; there are other groups developing related technologies and this piece would have been better if it had mentioned some of those efforts, even if briefly, in order to provide a broader context.

This is potentially a very important development in artificial intelligence. However, because the company is pursuing a patent on it, there is little they can really say much more than generally describing the goal of their application. In any technology story, one has to be aware of the potential for hyping the stock by making over-optimistic claims. Its value is in highlighting what seems to be a technical breakthrough; conversely, it also would indicate higher value to cryptography programs to prevent identity theft and unauthorized use of personal information in databases. As a contributor to Wikipedia, I would have been interested in finding out more about the ways the new technology would improve the uses of Wikipedia, ... More »