Identifying problems that are the appropriate level of difficulty for the technology

Note

This chapter is focused on technical considerations. Questions such as whether a market exists for a proposed application, or how to decide whether customers will find it appealing, are important questions, but they are outside of the scope of this book.

Here are some kinds of problems that are a good fit for the state of the art.

Today’s NLU is very good at handling problems based on specific, concrete topics, such as these examples:

• Classifying customers’ product reviews into positive and negative reviews: Online sellers typically offer buyers a chance to review products they have bought, which is helpful for other prospective buyers as well as for sellers. But large online retailers with thousands of products are then faced with the problem of what to do with the information from thousands of reviews. It’s impossible for human tabulators to read all the...