Collaboration between humans and computers in the natural language processing

Recently natural language processing technologies have been intensively studied, and they are in use for many applications including searches of document or the Web, automatic translation, dialog systems and grammar checking. IBM Research has several projects in this research area, including "Watson", a question answering system that competed with human champions on an American TV quiz show in 2011, and "TAKMI", a text mining solution that supports knowledge acquisition from massive text documents in real business scenarios. There are shared features among these research topics: applying computers to address human weakness, developing methodologies to capture human knowledge into computer-accessible forms, and revealing unexpected results through information processing. As a researcher in computational linguistics I describe areas we human beings should study to develop and apply computer science in the big data era.