Is artificial intelligence/natural language processing a futile pursuit?
trevelyan: I work on NLP for Chinese text with the Adso project (http://popupchinese.com/tools/downloads). This is a natural language processing engine that handles segmentation, sense analysis and semantic regexp for Chinese text.In my experience, the complexity of most NLP applications work against them in the sense that they're competing with simpler approaches that are less computationally intensive.  Good technology will let you do things other people can't do, but if you want to make it a business you'll need to know how to compete against Google doing 80% of what you can do with simple pattern matching. Your results will need to be orders of magnitude better before you have something people will use, let alone for which they'll pay. And be careful not to get trapped in a field where you'll be competing against companies paying serious cash for commercial databases to which you do not have access.I'm personally skeptical there is much of a market for sentiment analysis incidentally, but the same tools are pretty useful for search (preprocessing, etc.). I think you'll find it difficult to get third-party adoption unless your product drives direct revenue for someone or can very visibly improve their product. But the problems are important and worth solving!