Geoffrey Pullum is a reputed professor of Linguistics. Yet, the article comes off as written by an awfully ignorant person. Forget pragmatics. There won't be a

Geoffrey Pullum is a reputed professor of Linguistics. Yet, the article comes off as written by an awfully ignorant person. Forget pragmatics. There won't be a generic (cross-domain) solution for that any time soon. What happened to Powerset? Doesn't really matter. The brains behind it haven't been killed off. For example, Ronald Kaplan, the top-brain behind Powerset, now works for Nuance Communications. I suppose he will focus on making sure your voice interactions with computers will be smoother. "How could we have drifted into the second decade of the 21st century with absolutely no commercial NLP products?" What the heck does that mean? Our smartphones understand voice commands. We have decent TTS and speech recognition. The people behind IBM's Watson seem to be targeting medical knowledge discovery. With a quick scan on Wikipedia, I came across Distinguo, automated essay evaluation, Google Translate makes my life so much easier already, etc. If Pullum meant that he is still not able to buy an oven that understand his voice commands, sure. But saying that we have "absolutely no commercial NLP products" is braindamaged.