Reading(1): NLU vs. NLP

I began to finish my first reading day on Natural Language Understanding, Second Edition by James F. Allen.
After reading the first ten pages (from head page to the end of the catalog), there was so much information I collected.
Firstly, the author gave me an introduction about the difference of NLP and NLU, and described the gap between them. NLU(Natural Language Understanding) emphasizes the importance of interpreting meaning and intent in order to achieve "deep" understanding on what is said. NLP(Natural Language Processing) refers to any techniques that are used to process linguistic information, and currently involve little semantics and intent. While NLP can serve many useful tasks, such as helping design better search engines, better information retrieval, and rough summarization and rough translation of documents, it so far has little to suggest about meaning and intent. This book attempts to combine the best NLP techniques with work connected with meaning, understanding, intent, reasoning, and acting. It describes how recent advances in statistical language processing can be used to advantage in natural language understanding.

This book was written in 1995. So it was ten years ago. When Jams wrote it, there was a rift forming in the language processing community. Work on language understanding and work on statistical methods were considered to be competing incompatible methodologies. Researchers working on statistical methods are increasingly turning their attention to semantics and meaning, and work in language understanding is increasingly using statistical techniques to improve algorithms, ranging from parsing to intent recognition.

So the two factions were fusing to be one. As studying in Computer Department from undergraduate, I believed I was belonged to the one working on statistical methods. So I was in need of reading this book.

From Carl, I learned to visit the information of the publication's author. The following link was his homepage: http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/www/u/james. His publications from the DBLP Bibliography Server was in this link:http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/a/Allen:James_F=.htmlHe was so famous and had done lots on dialogue. This was my current surveying point. I hoped I could get some useful information from him.