Sharon Ulery 9/21/06 Research Report #1
1. Which research area(s) is a match for the project(s) you are interested in?
Computational Linguistics

2. Within the above research area(s), locate a project(s) that is similar to your interest.
	* Title of the project(s): Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing- Chapter 1- Manning and Schutze

	* Abstract of this project (describe in several sentences the focus and goal of the project(s)).
Manning and Schutze are considering the problem of having a computer "understand" natural language. They believe that language cannot be divided into "grammatical" and "ungrammatical" statements; rather there are more and less commonly used structures. They use a method such that the program learns the parts of speech of words and common syntactical structures by training it on a large body of input text from a wide variety of fields.

	* What are the results and conclusions? What are areas for continued research? (if this can be determined)
Obviously, their methods do not produce perfect results, but this more modern approach is much more robust than the older approach of hardwiring all knowledge into the program at the beginning. It can be made to expand much more easily if the software grows by reading more text than if the programmers must write further grammar rules directly into the code.

	* Link to this project(s) and to the paper (if a link exists to the paper): the textbook you gave me

3. What software (computer languages) was used in this project you've found (if this information is available).
The ideas presented could be used in a variety of languages; the authors didn't state a prefered language.

4. What software (computer language(s)) do you expect to use in your own project.
I plan to use Java.