[Sigia-l] Natural Language Searching vs Keyword Searching

[Tanya Rabourn]

On Fri, 20 Feb 2004, Gary Carlson wrote:
> In my limited experience I came to the following, subjective,
> conclusions.  Natural Language processing (along with Baysian, vector
> anaylsis, etc) does do a fair to middlin job on large doc sets, and may
> be the best solution when you have a large corpus of untagged content
> which is not mission critical.

My understanding of what exactly is meant by "natural
language processing" is a bit fuzzy. What's the difference
then between that and the search engines that analyze
content and recommend terms for a taxonomy? E.g.
http://www.iawiki.net/AutomatedClassification

The original question asked was about natural language
search -- where a user enters a question. Is it the same
thing as natural language processing? Does the ability
to handle a user entering a search in the form of a
question mean that the search engine is actually using
natural language processing?

-tanya