What is needed?

 

Frankly, a fresh new approach is needed, fueled by the conviction that language is a biological phenomenon, not a logical phenomenon.

By this we mean that the nature of language is as messy as the genome. The data and observed phenomena in all their richness and variety are dominant and cannot subsumed by any elegant theories.

This means that in many ways, biologists have far better hopes of cracking the NLP problem than the computational linguists, who are focused on mathematics and logic. Even when they look at data, it is primarily as grist for their math mills.