We all speak in natural language every day, but when it comes to turning natural language into something a computer can understand, the job is a lot more difficult. Machine languages traditionally have very clear-cut commands that access the information or services that users want, and trying to bridge the gap between the two concepts can be difficult. That's making for both challenges in the market, and opportunities for those with ways to overcome said challenges in the natural language processing (NLP) field.

A recent report from Reportlinker.com took a closer look at the field of natural language processing, and what it discovered should give both everyone in that marketplace, and those simply thinking about getting in either as a buyer or a seller, a note of pause. Reportlinker.com's study, titled “Natural Language Processing (NLP) Market [IVR, OCR, Pattern Recognition, Auto Coding, Text Analytics, Speech Analytics, Machine Translation, Information Extraction, Question Answer, Report Generation] – Worldwide Market Forecast & Analysis”, takes a broad look at the overall field, which in turn offered plenty of more specific insight into said field.

The report took a closer look at issues in the global market, focusing on types of NLP like rule-based and statistical NLP, as well as in terms of services like installation and maintenance. Technologies, including recognition and operational technologies, also get some attention here, as well as individual focuses on regions in which the technology is used, and for what purposes (enterprise or consumer level) it is used.

As is evident from the sheer range the report covers, NLP is a field that covers a lot of ground. With applications at the consumer level, at the enterprise level, and at a host of fields that can work in both sides of the coin equally, NLP has a dizzying array of possibilities behind it. Naturally, this is not an easy field in which to work; trying to get a computer to not only understand spoken English but act on that understanding is a technology that's still working. Consider the sheer number of times users have turned to a search engine and been unable to find what was searched for, since the search engine was looking for keywords as opposed to context. Getting machines to understand commands is one thing, keywords another, but actual spoken language is a tall order. With some major names operating in that market—like Microsoft, 3M (News - Alert), Nuance Communications and IBM (News - Alert), among several others—the field of NLP is likely to take on a new importance thanks to the sheer amount of work being done in the field.

Just where all that research and effort will go remains to be seen, but one thing is quite clear. With everything from voice translation systems to improved operating systems in the offing as a result of work done in this field, being able to give computers a better understanding of regular, plain-spoken language is likely to make computers much easier for regular people to work with, as well as improving the overall outlook for a variety of different systems within the larger grouping of computers itself.