Last night Powerset hosted the SF Semantic Web Meetup, organized by Marco Neumann, where we gave a talk about NLP and the Semantic Web. I presented some work in progress on instant answers (slides) and my colleague Scott Waterman presented ongoing work by our group (Text Processing for Semantic Applications) on triples extraction using our natural language pipeline. In addition, Bill Flitter from Dlvr.it talked about the publishing industry in the emerging world of the realtime web.
We enjoyed giving our presentations and appreciated the feedback that we received. One of the questions that came up during the question time after my talk was one that I frequently encounter, which is why finite state transducers aren't just regular expressions. What I normally say, but perhaps failed to say clearly enough on this occasion, is that finite state transducers are regular expression, but they do a lot more. As my former colleague Brendan O'Connor used to say, "Finite state transducers are regular expressions on steroids!" I think that's right, and at some point I should write up a more detailed and technical explanation of what that means.