Re: How good is Perl for AI?

[Hanamaki]

I am not sure what AI is -- or to say it in other words -- whether something like AI really exists. Anyway it seems much better to ask whether Perl is suitable for a given task inside AI or NLP.

Okay, I have to admit I never have done AI, and if you ask me I will tell you that I have no clue about AI, I am just a dumb Natural Language Engineering specialist who calls himself sometimes Computer Linguist or Consulting Linguist .

And yes for my NLP work I almost exclusivly use Perl, because its perfect for Data munging. While you will not write an embedded speech recognition engine in Perl, more than 90% of the actual work to produce such a beast can be done in Perl. And its done in Perl.

For Corpus Linguistics -- very often an important starting point for Natural Language Engineering -- Perl is a pretty good tool, not only for prototyping.

Some lightweight parser you could realize in Perl as well, but if you have large dictionaries etc. you probably will need some XS or C programms for speed.

Hanamaki