Natural language processing: she needs something old and something new (maybe something borrowed and something blue, too)

TL;DR

This paper advocates for a renewed focus on understanding the nature of language and emphasizes the importance of discourse structure in improving summarization tasks within natural language processing.

Contribution

It highlights the need to reconsider foundational questions about language and proposes focusing on discourse structure to advance summarization techniques.

Findings

Emphasizes the importance of language understanding for NLP progress.

Proposes discourse structure as key to improving summarization.

Calls for a revival of foundational language research.

Abstract

Given the present state of work in natural language processing, this address argues first, that advance in both science and applications requires a revival of concern about what language is about, broadly speaking the world; and second, that an attack on the summarising task, which is made ever more important by the growth of electronic text resources and requires an understanding of the role of large-scale discourse structure in marking important text content, is a good way forward.