What Discovery is

Discovery is software that performs natural language processing—a branch of artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between humans and computer using human languages such as English. Its main challenge is to enable computer programs to understand human text or speech as it is written or spoken, at least as far as is possible for a machine. Put another way, natural language processing (or NLP) attempts to mimic a human's understanding of human language.

Discovery presently conducts a complete grammatical and semantic analysis of virtually any English sentence. The only limitations are a 149,000-word vocabulary and 1289 grammar rules. New words and rules can be added easily, but currently the system has enough of these to accommodate most sentences it would be likely to encounter. While Discovery's present form focuses exclusively on sentence analysis, a colleague and I have embarked on further work on two lucrative practical applications which exploit this core sentence analysis technology.