A critical task in natural language understanding is to comprehend the topic of a sentence. The topic could be a tag (such as politics, music, gaming, immigration or adventure-sports), but usually it isn’t merely a named entity based task such as a person’s name or extracting location. This type of software is called topic taggers. Their utility cannot be overstated. Topics are key in extracting intent and formulating automated responses.

More from Suman Deb Roy

View all quotes →