Disappointing Business Natural Languages Talk

Jay Fields presented "Business Natural Languages" in QCon London 2008. I have tried to do natural language processing using Rules Engine and failed badly. I am not sure whether the Rules Engine implementation I selected was not a good one or just Rules Engine in general are not a good choice for natural language processing. Anyway coming back to the presentation. I was so excited about this presentation and attended it. I have to say I was little disappointed. First of all , I think I have seen this presentation like a year ago ( I might be wrong ) . I am surprised that nothing has changed for a year in this field. Jay used frequent flier example for showing how we can do BNL. I am not convinced with that example. Remember Petstore made Entity Beans look like solution that we were praying and waiting for. The frequent flier example was so simple. I am not against anything being simple but businesses are not simple. In his example , the rules he had were somewhat like,

• If flying in Class B,C than allocate 2 Points
• If flying in Class D than allocate 1 Point

The example simplified the business problem so much that it is not useful. I would like to see rules that are contradicting each other. So much research has been done in Rules Engine to handle Contention , Contradictions etc. I do not think we can ignore these things, as Businesses are not that simple.

It was nice presentation to show what is possible with BNL, but that is where it stops. I would like to see some more realistic rules.