semanticsoftware.info

I've created a new mailing list for people interested in discussing the combination of Software Engineering (SE) and Natural Language Processing (NLP): SENLP.

Compared with other application areas, like bio-NLP, the "software NLP" community is still rather small. The idea of this mailing list is to bring together scientists, students, and practitioners that are interested in exchanging experiences, tools, resources, and other information concerning these two areas. So, the first major topic of this mailing list is any kind of application of NLP in software engineering: for example, analysing (and improving) requirements specifications, creating and maintaining traceability links between code and its documentation, or the analysis of any other kind of software artifact containing natural language: user guides, source code comments, bug reports, repository check-in messages, email exchanges between stakeholders, software-related blog entries, or IM/twitter/chat logs. All of these sources contain valuable knowledge that can help both software engineers and end users, but are rarely integrated in an automated fashion in today's software engineering tools and desktop environments.

A related topic is the inverse direction: applying software engineering methods to the development of NLP systems. This area is even less developed than the direction mentioned above: if you think software engineers look confused when confronted with ideas and tools from natural language processing and language technology, try talking to computational linguists about software engineering methodologies! However, with NLP and text mining now entering mainstream applications, from the single home user's desktop to their use in multi-national corporations, it becomes increasingly important to address the systematic design, implementation, deployment, and maintenance of language-technology based systems. This is only starting to be covered by current research (and teaching). A mailing list that (I hope) will attract people from both sides should provide for some interesting discussions (and the occasional flamewar ;)

To sign up to the mailing list (and edit your subscription), simply use the mailman interface. The corresponding SENLP-ML web page will also be updated from time to time.