Use of semantics in real life applications

Semantics has many different definitions in science. In natural language processing, there has been much research over the past three decades involving extracting the semantics, the meaning, of natural texts. This has led to entity recognition (people, places, companies, prices, dates, and events), and more recently into sentiment analysis, exploring another level of meaning in a text. These techniques are now well understood and robust. Results of this research are beginning to appear in products and online sites, finding their way into practical applications. The stage is set for an explosion of semantically savvy applications, from 3D design, to enhanced web browsing, to social network aware yellowpages. This talk will explore these paths from research to industry, illustrated by current products on the market.