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New Brunswick New Democratic Party

The New Brunswick New Democratic Party (Nouveau Parti démocratique du Nouveau-Brunswick) is a social democratic provincial political party in New Brunswick, Canada linked with the federal New Democratic Party (NDP).

Origins and early history
The origins of the New Brunswick NDP can be traced back to the establishment of the Fredericton Socialist League in 1902. Prominent leaders within the movement included poet and publisher Martin Butler, as well as educator Henry Harvey Stuart, who formed a Fredericton local of the new Socialist Party of Canada in 1905. The SPC had several branches in the province prior to the First World War. Stuart was later a supporter of independent labour candidates, who had two successful candidates in Northumberland County in the 1920 provincial election. Additionally, nine Farmer candidates were elected that year. A strong believer in building alliances among the province's social movements, Stuart was later an influential figure in the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation to the time of his death in 1952.

The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), a social-democratic and democratic socialist federal political party, was organized at Calgary in 1932. A detailed platform, known as the Regina Manifesto, was adopted the following year. In New Brunswick, supporters of the new party convinced the New Brunswick Federation of Labour to sponsor a founding convention for the New Brunswick Section of the CCF. This took place at Moncton in June 1933, with party leader J.S. Woodsworth in attendance. Harry Girvan of Coal Creek was elected president.

The New Brunswick CCF was slow to become established on the provincial political scene. It ran only one candidate in the 1939 election, Joseph C. Arrowsmith in the riding of Saint John City, winning 712 votes. The fortunes of the New Brunswick CCF rose in tandem with growing expectations for postwar social reform and the rising fortunes of the national CCF, including the election of the CCF in Saskatchewan in 1944. Under the leadership of J. A. Mugridge, a trade unionist and the chief electrician at the Saint John Drydock and Shipbuilding Company, the CCF won 11.7 percent of the vote in New Brunswick's 1944 provincial election. The best results were in Edmundston, Saint John, and Moncton, which had large numbers of union members. In that election, the CCF described itself as "the People's Party", running on a twelve-point program that included public ownership and full development of all natural resources including electricity, oil and gas and other public utilities.

The 1944 election proved to be an electoral high-point for the CCF in New Brunswick. A combination of anti-CCF propaganda, the increasing adoption of somewhat progressive policies by the New Brunswick Liberals and Conservatives, and a general trend of post-war decline for the CCF nationally all contributed to weaken the New Brunswick CCF in the 1948 provincial election. This time under Arrowsmith's leadership, they received half the votes they had won in 1944 and again won no seats. In the 1952 provincial election, the CCF ran only 12 candidates and received only 1.3% of the vote and no seats. The CCF ran no candidates in the 1956 and 1960 provincial elections.

The NDP to 1988
The New Brunswick CCF retired from the scene to give way to the New Democratic Party (NDP), which was founded in 1961 as a Canadian social- democratic party with strong ties to organized labour, especially the Canadian Labour Congress, which was instrumental in founding the new party. At the provincial level, the New Brunswick NDP was organized in December 1962. Prospects were not good during the 1960s, however, as the province's new Liberal premier, Louis J. Robichaud, was a left-of-centre populist politician who won three successive provincial elections and introduced significant social reforms. The New Brunswick NDP did not run candidates in the 1963 provincial election and ran only three candidates in the 1967 provincial election.

In 1971, a party convention narrowly endorsed a manifesto proposed by the New Brunswick Waffle, a local group loosely related to the minority wing of the federal NDP known as The Waffle, which was known for advocating stronger socialist and nationalist policies. The federal NDP responded to the New Brunswick upset by temporarily dissolving the provincial NDP until non-Waffle leadership was re-established with the reinstatement of J. Albert Richardson. The Waffle episode had the effect of promoting greater labour involvement in the party, for fear that the party would fall under the sway of more radical supporters without it.

During the late 1970s, under the leadership of John LaBossiere, the party increasingly adopted policy positions that reflected feminist and environmentalist concerns, including opposition to aerial spruce budworm spraying and the construction of the Point Lepreau nuclear plant. These initiatives attracted new supporters while also weakening relations with some labour supporters. The party also saw its membership grow and its organizational abilities improve during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Along with promoting traditional social-democratic NDP policies, the party also attacked government patronage and poor fiscal management.

Relations with organized labour and the women's movement improved further after George Little became party leader in 1980. During Little's time as leader, in the 1982 New Brunswick election the party won its first-ever seat in Tantramar, with the election of Robert Hall to the legislature. A second seat was won in a 1984 by-election in East Saint John, but Peter Trites left to join the Liberals before the next election. The New Brunswick NDP ran a full slate of candidates for the first time in the 1987 campaign. The period saw increasing popular support (surpassing 10% for the first time) and rising membership totals, numbering over 1,000 by the mid-1980s. However, the party failed to win any seats in 1987, due to the tidal wave of support for Frank McKenna and the Liberals, who won more than 60% of the vote and took 100% of the seats in the legislature. Little stepped down from the leadership in 1988. Robert Hall served as interim leader until a leadership conference was held.

Elizabeth Weir (1988–2005)
In June 1988, Elizabeth Weir, the party's former provincial secretary, was elected as the party's new leader. After the one-sided 1987 election, Premier McKenna allowed leaders of the unrepresented parties to ask questions in the legislature and in the public accounts committee. Weir took full advantage of the opportunity, using her training as a lawyer and her speaking skills to needle the government. Her media presence and political stature increased significantly, and she was sometimes referred to by cabinet ministers as the unofficial Leader of the Opposition. In the 1991 provincial election, Weir won a seat in Saint John South, making her the first provincial NDP leader to be elected to the legislature. She was re-elected in the new constituency of Saint John Harbour in the 1995 provincial election, running against a star Liberal candidate. Weir won re-election twice more after this.

During her time in the legislature, Weir proved a strong critic of McKenna's neo-liberal policies, successfully attacking public-private partnerships such as a plan to have a youth detention centre built and operated by an American corporation. She was also an ally of organized labour in resisting legislated wage freezes that were directed at public sector employees. She promoted the expansion of union rights through legislation to prohibit the use of replacement workers in strikes. At the request of organized labour, Weir introduced the Workers Mourning Day Act, enacted in 2000, which established 28 April as an annual day of recognition for workers killed or injured in the workplace. In other areas, she addressed issues such as women's rights, pay equity, environmental protection, poverty and the rights of social assistance recipients. During her last term, she was successful in gaining the support of an all-party committee for public automobile insurance.

Despite Weir's personal popularity and her ability to attract strong candidates, she was not able to add extra seats to the party caucus. This was especially disappointing in light of the election of Yvon Godin as a federal NDP Member of Parliament in Acadie-Bathurst in 1997; he ultimately served five terms in Parliament. In 2004, Weir announced her plan to step down as leader and also resigned her seat after a new leader was chosen the following year.

Challenges (2005–2017)
The period immediately following Weir's departure was a difficult one for the party. Allison Brewer was elected as party leader in September 2005, but faced challenges due to her inability to speak French and her lack of experience in electoral politics. In the 2006 provincial election the NDP failed to run a full slate and saw their popular vote collapse. Brewer resigned soon after the election. Pat Hanratty stood in as interim leader.

He was replaced by Roger Duguay in 2007. Duguay's tenure as leader was dominated by a shakeup in the party's internal operations. Much of the old executive of the party was replaced in 2009 and a new team of modernizers began to gain prominence within the party. During the 2010 provincial election the party platform combined traditional progressive social policy, education and health spending with a greater emphasis on the need for fiscal prudence and balanced budgets and cutting wasteful government spending, including opposition to corporate welfare. The party more than doubled its share of the vote, returning to the levels achieved under Little and Weir, but no candidate, including Duguay, won a seat. He resigned as leader in November 2010.

Following Duguay's resignation, Jesse Travis was named interim leader, and a leadership race was scheduled for 2011. When one of the two candidates, Pierre Cyr, was disqualified and withdrew, the party's former campaign director Dominic Cardy was acclaimed as party leader. In a leadership review at the 2012 party convention, Cardy was endorsed by 82% of the voting members. He then continued the process of changing the party's policies and organization, in line with the Third Way model associated with former British prime minister Tony Blair, whom Cardy admired. By 2014, however, Cardy's political strategy was attracting criticism, especially on issues of policies on resource development in forestry, oil pipelines and shale gas. Concerns increased when Cardy recruited several prominent former Conservative and Liberal politicians as candidates for the 2014 election. These factors contributed to the defection of some NDP supporters, including former leader Allison Brewer, to the Green Party of New Brunswick, who were successful in electing David Coon in Fredericton South. The NDP received 13% of the vote in the September 22, 2014 provincial election, a record high in votes. Although Cardy came within 500 votes of winning in his constituency, the party failed to win any seats.

Cardy announced plans to resign at the next party convention, but this was suspended to enable him to run in an unexpected byelection in Saint John East in November 2014, though without success. The party executive subsequently encouraged him to continue as leader. Criticism of Cardy's policies and leadership style increased, with concerns expressed by veteran leaders such as federal NDP MP Yvon Godin and Daniel Légère, president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, New Brunswick. Complaining of party infighting, Cardy resigned both as leader and as a party member on 1 January 2017. Later that month, he announced that he was joining the Progressive Conservatives under party leader Blaine Higgs as a member of his staff. He subsequently was appointed to cabinet when Higgs's PCs formed government.

Jennifer McKenzie (2017–2019)
On 10 August 2017, Jennifer McKenzie of St. Martins, a rural community east of Saint John, was confirmed as the new leader of the party. Before returning to New Brunswick, she served as chair of the public school board in Ottawa, Ontario. In the 2015 federal election, she ran as a candidate in Fundy-Royal, finishing in third place with 17.5% of the votes. An electrical engineer and tech entrepreneur by background, McKenzie ran for the NDP leadership on a pledge to bring the party back to its traditions of advancing social, environmental and economic justice. Outgoing interim leader Rosaire L'Italien described the change as a "rebirth" of the party and welcomed previously alienated party members to return. "I am a socialist and I believe in the power of people working together," McKenzie stated at a press conference, "I hope to take this party into the future based on the solid principles on which the New Democrats are founded." Among the party's planks for the 2018 election were plans to reduce university tuition and to eliminate community college tuition fees, plans to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and plans to roll out a universal daycare and after school program run by school districts. Under McKenzie's leadership, the party registered between 5% and 13% support in the polls. More than half the party's candidates in 2018 were women, making the NDP the only political party to achieve this level. On election night, however, the NDP was eclipsed on the left by the Green Party, whose supporters included many former NDP voters. The party received 5% of the vote and was reduced to fifth place, behind the Greens and the People's Alliance of New Brunswick, who each elected three members. McKenzie placed third in Saint John Harbour, with 14.7% of the vote, slightly ahead of the Green candidate. At a party meeting on 24 February 2019, delegates voted narrowly in favour of holding a leadership convention. The following day, McKenzie stated she did not intend to run in the contest and announced her resignation.

Decline (2019–present)
In March 2019, party representatives chose 21-year-old Mackenzie Thomason, a candidate in New Maryland-Sunbury in the preceding election, as interim leader. A leadership convention was planned for August 2019, but was cancelled due to a lack of acceptable candidates.

Prospects for renewal continued to be discouraging when it was announced, in a joint statement on 3 September, that fourteen candidates who ran for the NDP in the 2018 provincial election were joining the Greens. Within days, however, five of those candidates denied they were leaving the NDP and said they believed they were supporting a merger of the two parties. Green Party leader David Coon apologized for failing to confirm the decision with each of the fourteen candidates before welcoming them into his party as a group. He also said there had been no formal discussion of a merger of the two parties. A news story later revealed that one of the candidates who led the move to leave the NDP had failed to qualify for the party leadership contest.

In November 2019, the party announced plans for a new leadership race, with the decision set for 14 June 2020. In April 2020, however, party president Cyprien Okana announced a decision to postpone the convention due to the emergency conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thomason then led the party into a snap provincial election held on 14 September 2020. There were 33 candidates, many of them youthful, but none were elected and the party’s vote share dropped below two percent, the lowest since 1967. Thomason resigned as interim leader on 15 November 2020, and was quickly succeeded by party communications director Nathan Davis, who stepped down almost immediately, citing a change in circumstances following a family emergency.

On 12 December, the party chose a new interim leader, 25-year-old Chris Thompson of Fredericton. On 14 September 2021, Thomason returned to the leadership, this time on a permanent basis, by acclamation.

In May 2022, ahead of two by-elections in which the NDP failed to nominate candidates, the CBC reported that Thomason had lost a non-binding confidence vote by the party's executive council. Several weeks later, on 14 June, Thomason announced that due to internal dissension he was resigning the leadership, reluctantly, with effect from 28 June. A longstanding party member from Saint John, Alex White, was subsequently named interim leader, with a party convention expected to choose a new leader in July. According to a newsletter released by the party in May 2023, plans were changed, with a convention scheduled for 30 September 2023. However, as only one candidate registered, interim leader Alex White was acclaimed the party's new permanent leader on 11 August.

New Brunswick CCF

 * J. A. (Jim) Mugridge 1944 election
 * Joseph C. Arrowsmith 1948 election
 * Claude P. Milton 1952 election

New Brunswick NDP

 * Jack Currie, 1965–1968
 * post vacant, 1968–1970
 * J. Albert Richardson, 1970–1971
 * Pat Callaghan (The New Brunswick Waffle) 1971 (disputed)
 * J. Albert Richardson, 1971–1976
 * John LaBossiere, 1976–1980
 * George Little 1980–1988
 * Robert Hall (interim) 1988
 * Elizabeth Weir 1988–2005
 * Allison Brewer 2005–2006
 * Pat Hanratty (interim) 2006–2007
 * Roger Duguay 2007–2010
 * Jesse Travis (interim) 2010–2011
 * Dominic Cardy 2011–2017
 * Rosaire L'Italien (interim) 2017
 * Jennifer McKenzie 2017–2019
 * Mackenzie Thomason (interim) 2019–2020
 * Nathan Davis (interim) 2020
 * Chris Thompson (interim) 2020–2021
 * Mackenzie Thomason 2021-2022
 * Alex White (interim) 2022–2023
 * Alex White 2023 – present

NDP members of the NB Legislative Assembly
There are currently no New Democrats in the Legislative Assembly of New Brunswick. In the past, three separate individuals have been elected as New Democrats and they are as follows:
 * Robert Hall, Tantramar; 1982 to his defeat in the 1987 election
 * Peter Trites, East Saint John; 1984 by-election until joining the Liberals in 1986
 * Elizabeth Weir, Saint John South (1991–1995), Saint John Harbour (1995–2005); 1991 to 2005

The NDP's predecessor, the CCF never won a seat in the New Brunswick legislature. In the 1920 general election nine United Farmers and two Farmer-Labour MLAs were elected.

title: New Brunswick New Democratic Party


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Soleidae

The true soles are a family, Soleidae, of flatfishes. It includes saltwater and brackish water species in the East Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and West and Central Pacific Ocean. Freshwater species are found in Africa, southern Asia, New Guinea, and Australia.

In the past, soles of the Americas (both fresh and salt water) were included in this family, but they have been separated to their own family, the American soles (Achiridae). The only true sole remaining in that region is Aseraggodes herrei of the Galápagos and Cocos Island.

The true soles are bottom-dwelling fishes feeding on small crustaceans and other invertebrates. The family contains 30 genera and a total of about 180 species.

Soles begin life as bilaterally symmetric larvae, with an eye on each side of the head, but during development, the left eye moves around onto the right side of the head. Adult soles lie on their left (blind) sides on the sea floor, often covered in mud, which in combination with their dark colours, makes them hard to spot.

A flatfish resembling a small halibut or sole was observed by the bathyscaphe Trieste at the bottom of the Mariana Trench at a depth around 11 km. This observation has been questioned by fish experts, and recent authorities do not recognize it as valid.

Many soles are important food species: the common sole, Solea solea, is popular in northern Europe and the Mediterranean.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Soleidae


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Mario Cipollini

Mario Cipollini (born 22 March 1967), often abbreviated to Cipo, is a retired Italian professional road cyclist most noted for his sprinting ability, the longevity of his dominance (his first pro win came in 1988, his last in 2005; 170 professional wins, 192 including criteriums), and his colourful personality. His nicknames include Il Re Leone (The Lion King) and Super Mario. He is regarded as having been the best sprinter of his generation.

His career highlights include the Road World Championships and Milan–San Remo in 2002, and 42 stages in the Giro d'Italia. He also won 12 stages in the Tour de France and three stages in the Vuelta a España.

Career
Cipollini was born in San Giusto di Compito, surrounded by the mountains of Capannori south of Lucca, Tuscany. He came from a cycling family – his father, Vivaldo, had been a successful amateur racer in his youth, whilst his brother Cesare had raced as a professional and his sister Tiziana had also competed as a cyclist. Mario was a prolific winner in his youth career, scoring a total of 125 victories in age group and amateur races before joining the professional peloton in 1989. In the 1999 Tour de France, he led the peloton on the fastest stage in the history of the Tour, averaging more than 50 km/h over 194.5 km. In the same Tour, he won 4 stages in a row, setting the post-World War II record for consecutive stage wins. He has also found success in Belgium, winning Gent–Wevelgem in 1992, 1993 and 2002 (record).

At the peak of his career, Cipollini's speed was unrivaled, and he is credited with being the first rider with a sprint train. The red jerseys of his team, featuring team-mates such as Paolo Fornaciari, Giuseppe Calcaterra, Gian Matteo Fagnini and Mario Scirea, were commonly seen at the front of the peloton toward the end of the flat Grand Tour stages in the late 1990s. The train kept the pace high in the closing kilometers, to dissuade opposing riders from attacking and to ensure that in the final 200–300 meters, Cipollini was the only cyclist able to maintain the speed. This changed the way teams approached mass sprints and bred a new generation of sprinters, such as fellow Italian Alessandro Petacchi.

The beginning of 2002 saw Cipollini win Milan–San Remo with his new Acqua-Sapone team, and later Gent–Wevelgem. However, a falling-out with the organizers of the Tour de France made him announce his retirement. Italian national coach Franco Ballerini convinced him to return to competition, and built the Italian national team around Cipollini for the 2002 UCI Road World Championships. Cipollini won the rainbow jersey in a sprint finish in Zolder, Belgium.

In the 2003 Giro d'Italia, Cipollini focused on Alfredo Binda's record 41 Giro stage wins while in the world champion's jersey. His attempt was almost derailed by Alessandro Petacchi of the Fassa Bortolo team. After many failed attempts, he finally broke the record, although he had to abandon the next stage due to injuries in a crash on a rain-soaked finish. He said that the crash ended his career. His team, Domina Vacanze-Elitron, was left out of the Tour de France that year, prompting a comment from Cipollini that the organisers disrespected the rainbow jersey. When he retired from the 2004 Giro due to another crash, it was the only time he entered the Giro without winning a single stage.

In 2008, he returned to competitive cycling with the Rock Racing team at the Tour of California.

Retirement
After having vowed to retire several times in his career, usually in a public fit of pique, Cipollini finally made good on his promise on 26 April 2005, one week before the start of the 2005 Giro. His swan song was to participate in a ceremonial prologue of the Giro wearing a fluorescent pink skin suit, which listed his 42-stage wins.

Cipollini emerged from retirement in early 2008, with Rock Racing. His first race back was the 2008 Tour of California, and he finished third on stage 2. On the eve of the Milan–San Remo, he announced that he would retire again, citing disagreements over his leadership role on Rock Racing.

Controversies
Cipollini made no secret that he did not like climbing stages, and while he completed all stages of the Giro on many occasions, he infuriated purists by not attempting mountain stages at the Tour or Vuelta. While this is a common practice with sprinters without points jersey aspirations so as to save themselves for the rest of the season, Cipollini's practice of releasing photos of himself lounging at the beach while the others struggled in the mountains earned him more than his fair share of attention in this regard.

Cipollini also became famous for extravagant clothing, especially racing uniforms, sporting custom-made skin suits. Some of his memorable kits include a muscle suit, zebra, and tiger prints, and a techno-skinsuit inspired by the 1982 film Tron. Off the course, Cipollini and his Saeco squad dressed as ancient Romans during a rest day at the 1999 Tour de France, to celebrate Julius Caesar's birthday and to commemorate Cipollini's record fourth consecutive Tour de France stage win. He was fined for wearing an all-yellow outfit while leading the Tour de France; this practice to wear more yellow and even have a yellow bike has since become generally accepted.

These antics violated UCI regulations, which resulted in Cipollini and his team being fined thousands of Swiss francs. The muscle suit fetched 100 million lira (US$43,710) in a charity auction, nearly 100 times the fine. Some organisers, especially Jean-Marie Leblanc of the Tour de France, took offence at his hijinks and he wasn't invited to race in the Tour from 2000 to 2003, despite being the world champion in 2003.

Cipollini was kicked out of the 2000 Vuelta a España after he punched Vitalicio Seguros rider Francisco Cerezo to the ground before the start of a stage. Later in 2003, he drew the ire of the organisers of the Vuelta a España when he quit after the prologue time trial. His team had been invited to compete with the condition that Cipollini participated. He said he was recovering from injury and should not have been forced to race in the first place.

In February 2013, news surfaced that Cipollini could have been a client of doctor Eufemiano Fuentes from 2001 to 2004. A report published by Italian newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport alleged that Cipollini's codename was "Maria" and that he received various doping products, including injecting 25 blood bags from the beginning of 2003 to the start of the Giro d'Italia in May. Cipollini's lawyer stated that the claims were false when the story was revealed on 9 February 2013.

His name was on the list of doping tests published by the French Senate on 24 July 2013 that were collected during the 1998 Tour de France and found positive for EPO when retested in 2004.

In June 2022, and following allegations of domestic violence and stalking, the public prosecutor of Lucca demanded a two and half years of prison sentence for Cipollini. In October 2022, Cipollini was sentenced by the Lucca court to 3 years in prison and to compensate the civil party for 85 thousand euros.

Personal life
Cipollini's powerful performances sometimes risked being eclipsed by his flamboyant manner and lifestyle. His height, looks and mane of hair earned him the nickname "Lion King", and he adopted other names, including "Super Mario" and "Mario the Magnificent." His wardrobe consisted of hundreds of suits, ties and shoes, many of which he never wore. In 2002, he was arrested for motorpacing on an Italian autostrada. He commented that it was the only place where he could safely get up to top speed for training. He responded to criticisms by claiming that he helped generate coverage for his sponsors, and that it was all part of his showmanship.

Cipollini married Sabrina Landucci in 1993. The couple separated in 2005. Despite being married through much of his career, Cipollini was regarded as a sex symbol and rumored to be a womaniser. He did little to dispel these notions with comments such as, "If I weren't a professional cyclist, I'd be a porn star".

Daniel Coyle's book Lance Armstrong's War says Cipollini's profile was little more than a decoy. The intent was that competitors would find themselves distracted by the constant media coverage of Cipollini, and demoralised by the impression that he could party all night and beat them the next morning.

Despite this boisterous public image, Cipollini could often be quite humble regarding his fellow cyclists. After breaking Alfredo Binda's record for Giro stage wins he remarked he would have been happy "just to polish [Binda's] shoes." Reacting to the 2004 death of Marco Pantani, Cipollini said, "I am devastated. It's a tragedy of enormous proportions for everyone involved in cycling. I'm lost for words."

In 2010 Cipollini started his own brand of bicycles which were used by the Italian team.

Major results

 * 1987
 * 1st Jersey yellow.svg Overall Regio-Tour

 * 1988
 * 1st Trofeo Città di Castelfidardo
 * 2nd Gran Premio della Liberazione

 * 1989
 * 1st Stage 12 Giro d'Italia
 * Giro di Puglia
 * 1st Stages 3, 4 & 5

 * 1990
 * 1st Milano–Vignola
 * Giro d'Italia
 * 1st Stages 13 & 20
 * Giro di Puglia
 * 1st Stages 2 & 5
 * 1st Stage 4a Three Days of De Panne

 * 1991
 * 1st Scheldeprijs
 * 1st Giro dell'Etna
 * Giro d'Italia
 * 1st Stages 3, 7 & 21
 * Giro di Puglia
 * 1st Stages 2 & 4
 * Étoile de Bessèges
 * 1st Stages 1 & 3
 * Settimana Internazionale di Coppi e Bartali
 * 1st Stages 4 & 5
 * 2nd Gent–Wevelgem
 * 8th E3 Prijs Vlaanderen

 * 1992
 * 1st Gent–Wevelgem
 * Giro d'Italia
 * 1st Jersey violet.svg Points classification
 * 1st Stages 4, 7, 16 & 20
 * Paris–Nice
 * 1st Stages 1, 2 & 4
 * Four Days of Dunkirk
 * 1st Jersey green.svg Points classification
 * 1st Stages 1, 3 & 7
 * Giro di Puglia
 * 1st Stages 1 & 3
 * 1st Stage 2 Three Days of De Panne
 * 1st Stage 2 Étoile de Bessèges
 * 9th Grand Prix d'Ouverture La Marseillaise

 * 1993
 * 1st Gent–Wevelgem
 * 1st E3 Prijs Vlaanderen
 * 1st Scheldeprijs
 * 1st Memorial Rik Van Steenbergen
 * Tour de France
 * 1st Stages 1 & 4 (TTT)
 * Held Jersey yellow.svg after Stages 4 & 6
 * Held Jersey green.svg after Stages 1 & 7–10
 * Paris–Nice
 * 1st Stages 1, 4 & 5
 * Tour Méditerranéen
 * 1st Stages 4 & 5
 * 6th Omloop Het Volk
 * 10th Milan–San Remo

 * 1994
 * Paris–Nice
 * 1st Stages 1 & 6
 * Tour Méditerranéen
 * 1st Stages 5 & 6
 * 1st Stage 5 Settimana Internazionale di Coppi e Bartali
 * 2nd Milan–San Remo
 * 4th Paris–Tours
 * 4th Firenze–Pistoia

 * 1995
 * 1st Trofeo Luis Puig
 * 1st Monte Carlo–Alassio
 * Tour de France
 * 1st Stages 2 & 4
 * Held Jersey green.svg after Stages 4 & 5
 * Giro d'Italia
 * 1st Stages 1 & 3
 * Held Jersey pink.svg after Stage 1
 * Held Jersey violet.svg after Stages 1 & 3–9
 * Volta a Catalunya
 * 1st Stages 2, 3 & 5
 * Tour de Romandie
 * 1st Stages 2 & 6
 * Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana
 * 1st Stages 4 & 5
 * Tour Méditerranéen
 * 1st Stages 3, 4 & 5
 * 4th Gent–Wevelgem

 * 1996
 * 1st Jersey italianflag.svg Road race, National Road Championships
 * 1st Stage 2 Tour de France
 * Giro d'Italia
 * 1st Stages 4, 8, 11 & 18
 * Tour de Romandie
 * 1st Stages 3, 5 & 7
 * Volta a Catalunya
 * 1st Stages 2 & 5
 * Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana
 * 1st Stages 2 & 5a
 * Vuelta a Aragón
 * 1st Jersey green.svg Points classification
 * 1st Stages 3 & 5
 * 1st Stage 4 Tour Méditerranéen
 * 7th Milan–San Remo
 * 10th Telekom Grand Prix (with Mario Scirea)

 * 1997
 * Tour de France
 * 1st Stages 1 & 2
 * Held Jersey yellow.svg after Stages 1–4
 * Held Jersey green.svg after Stages 1 & 2
 * Giro d'Italia
 * 1st Jersey violet.svg Points classification
 * 1st Stages 1, 2, 4, 10 & 22
 * Held Jersey pink.svg after Stages 1 & 2
 * Tour de Romandie
 * 1st Stages 2, 3 & 5
 * Vuelta a Aragón
 * 1st Stages 2 & 4a
 * Tour Méditerranéen
 * 1st Stages 1 & 2
 * 1st Stage 1 Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana

 * 1998
 * 1st Gran Premio della Costa Etruschi
 * Tour de France
 * 1st Stages 5 & 6
 * Giro d'Italia
 * 1st Stages 5, 7, 8 & 10
 * Volta a Catalunya
 * 1st Stages 1a, 2, 3 & 4
 * 1st Stage 3 Tour Méditerranéen

 * 1999
 * 1st Trofeo Luis Puig
 * 1st Trofeo Manacor
 * 1st Trofeo Sóller
 * 1st Peperbus Profspektakel
 * Tour de France
 * 1st Stages 4, 5, 6 & 7
 * Giro d'Italia
 * 1st Stages 2, 10, 12 & 17
 * Held Jersey pink.svg after Stage 2
 * Volta a Catalunya
 * 1st Stages 1 & 2
 * 1st Stage 3 Tirreno–Adriatico
 * 1st Stage 5 Tour de Romandie

 * 2000
 * 1st Gran Premio della Costa Etruschi
 * Giro d'Italia
 * 1st Stage 4
 * Held Jersey pink.svg after Stage 1
 * Held Jersey violet.svg after Stage 4
 * Held Jersey blue.svg after Stage 1
 * Tour de Romandie
 * 1st Jersey green.svg Points classification
 * 1st Stages 1 & 5
 * 1st Stage 5a Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana
 * 1st Stage 6 Tour Méditerranéen

 * 2001
 * 1st Giro della Provincia di Siracusa
 * Giro d'Italia
 * 1st Stages 6, 9, 19 & 21
 * 1st Azzurri d'Italia classification
 * Vuelta a Aragón
 * 1st Stages 1 & 5
 * 1st Stage 5 Tour de Romandie
 * 1st Stage 4 Giro del Trentino
 * 2nd Milan–San Remo

 * 2002
 * 1st Jersey rainbow.svg Road race, UCI Road World Championships
 * 1st Milan–San Remo
 * 1st Gent–Wevelgem
 * Giro d'Italia
 * 1st Jersey violet.svg Points classification
 * 1st Stages 1, 3, 9, 15, 18 & 20
 * 1st Azzurri d'Italia classification
 * Held Jersey pink.svg after Stage 1
 * Held Jersey blue.svg after Stage 1
 * Vuelta a España
 * 1st Stages 3, 4 & 7
 * 1st Stage 7 Tirreno–Adriatico
 * 1st Stage 2 Tour Méditerranéen
 * 4th Trofeo Luis Puig
 * 9th Tour of Flanders

 * 2003
 * Giro d'Italia
 * 1st Stages 8 & 9
 * Held Jersey blue.svg after Stage 2
 * Tirreno–Adriatico
 * 1st Stages 1 & 3
 * 4th Milan–San Remo

 * 2004
 * 1st Stage 4 Tour Méditerranéen
 * 1st Stage 2 Tour de Georgia

 * 2005
 * 1st Giro della Provincia di Lucca
 * 1st Stage 4 Tour of Qatar
 * 5th International Grand Prix Doha

title: Mario Cipollini


text:
ISABELLE

ISABELLE (also known later as Colliding Beam Accelerator, CBA) was a 200+200 GeV proton–proton colliding beam particle accelerator partially built by the United States government at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, before it was cancelled in July, 1983.

Colliding beam accelerators
A colliding beam, storage ring accelerator was first proposed by Gerard O'Neill of Princeton in 1956, who built an electron-electron system beginning in 1957 (operational in 1962, first collisions in 1964) with assistance from Burton Richter, William C. Barber and Bernard Gittelman. The AdA accelerator, an electron-positron system, stored its first beam in 1961 at Frascati National Laboratories, Italy and was later moved to Orsay Laboratory, France, where in 1964 it recorded first e+e− collisions. At the same time, two colliding-beam experiments were conceived and built by Budker and his group at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk, Russia, Soviet Union: electron-electron VEP-1 (first collisions in 1964) and electron-positron VEPP-2 (first collisions in 1965).

The idea of using alternating gradient synchrotron (AGS) technology to build storage rings for a proton-proton colliding beam accelerator was considered at a summer study held at Brookhaven in 1963. The Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) facility at CERN, a 30+30 GeV proton-proton system, opened in 1971 and became the first high energy hadron collider. The SPEAR collider at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, a 3+3 GeV electron-positron system, was completed in 1972 and soon contributed to discoveries of the ψ meson and τ lepton, both recognized in Nobel Prizes. The ψ had previously been found in a fixed-target experiment at the Brookhaven AGS, where it was called the J, but it was better measured with SPEAR.

The ISABELLE project
A design study for a proton storage ring system was completed at Brookhaven in 1973. In 1974 the U.S. High Energy Physics Advisory Panel recommended that ISABELLE (the Intersecting Storage Accelerator + "belle") should be built at Brookhaven. It was to be a 200+200 GeV proton-proton system using superconducting magnets. New York politicians, spurred by the sometimes impetuous Sen. Moynihan, pushed through funding before development of magnet technology had been completed. Construction began in 1978. The following year a prototype magnet was successfully tested. In 1981, however, production models of magnets failed at less than the magnetic field intensity needed for operation.

Delays in the project led to competitive evaluation against a proposal for a much larger machine, eventually called the Superconducting Supercollider, a proton-proton system aimed at 20,000+20,000 GeV; while developments in Europe at CERN, including discovery of the W and Z bosons, appeared to make ISABELLE redundant. In July, 1983, the U.S. Department of Energy cancelled the ISABELLE project after spending more than US$200 million on it. Cancellation of ISABELLE accelerated the United States fall from dominance in high energy physics and proved a harbinger for the much more costly cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider in October, 1993. After years of planning and development, parts of the tunnel, experimental hall and magnet infrastructure built for ISABELLE were salvaged and reused by the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a US$617 million joint project of the U.S. Department of Energy and National Science Foundation which was approved in 1991 and began operation in 2000.

title: ISABELLE


text:
Talk:Natural language processing

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 26 August 2019 and 11 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Wendell guan.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 05:00, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

(Computational Linguistics) Merge
PRO  I think that this article should probably be merged with Computational linguistics, but I'm fairly new to the Wikipedia, so I'm not sure.
 * Lambda 22:55, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

CON  While they're related, they're not really the same thing. Computational linguistics tries to use computer techniques to better understand linguistics as a discipline, while NLP tries to build ways for a computer to understand language. Obviously many things overlap, but they have much different focus: NLP doesn't explicitly care if it's making new contributions to linguistics, and computational linguistics doesn't explicitly care if it's making it easier for computers to understand natural languages. --Delirium 22:58, Feb 22, 2004 (UTC)

Unclear My take on this (I'm a grad student studying NLP/CL) is that CL and NLP are the endpoints on a continuum, and so a lot of work in the middle is hard to classify as one or the other. They don't have separate conferences - the Association for Computational Linguistics (annual) and Computational Linguistics (biannual) are the main conferences for both NLP and CL research. 24.59.194.44 13:26, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

 * PRO I agree -- we should merge. Whether you call it NLP or CL is mostly a question of what aspect you stress. In addition, my impression is that the NLP tendency is currently stronger than the CL tendency in the field. Articles in the Computational Linguistics journal, and at the Coling and ACL conferences, are judged on whether they are useful rather than on whether they give any insight on how humans process language.Kallerdis (talk) 19:35, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

CON  There's a fine distinction between NLP and Computational Linguistics that has to do primarily with the distinction between computing and linguistics. Historically, NLP is associated with computing and CL with linguistics. I would be opposed to the merge for that reason. Investigations into the nature of language are misplaced in applied computing and practical aspects of parsing for say commercial applications are misplaced in Linguistics. 74.78.162.229 (talk) 21:30, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

 * PRO/Rebuttal Both NLP and CL have the same objectives, and this "fine distinction" is irrelevant when both CL and NLP involve computing and linguistics (who cares about the mixture proportions?). Dustin

 * CON I am agree. -- AKA MBG (talk) 09:58, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

PRO CL and NLP should be be merged. There are other fields: (I call) "Natural Language Understanding" or "Machine Reading" that have more ambitious goals:  get a computer to "understand" some natural language. NLP and CL have made more progress, but are application driven --the technology behind them is often just perl scrips making statistics from NL corpora. In any case, certainly NLP should merge with NLU or CL, but definitely not both. Dustin

 * PRO My understanding has always been that CL is the term used by people with linguistics backgrounds, while NLP is more often used by computer scientists. At worst, I'd call CL a core subfield of NLP. —/M endaliv /2¢/Δ's/ 23:31, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

 * CON CL is not a subfield of NLP, unless you're an NLP researcher ;) I've studied at both NLP-oriented departments and more CL-oriented ones. There's a lot of overlap, sure, but the approaches differ a lot (do we build corpora to study eg. the limits of case alignment in natural language, or to get testbeds for parsers?). Also, there is a difference in methods used, eg. in both fields there are those who swear to statistical methods, but NLP (eg. for parsing, MT) puts a lot of credit in Bayesian methods, while CL (eg. corpus linguists) uses more standard hypothesis tests. Kiwibird (talk) 11:57, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

 * PRO Excuse me for perhaps erroneously correcting an expert, but aren't you comparing NLP/CL to Corpus Linguistics rather than NLP to CL, you basically state as much.

PRO  I think that this article should probably be merged with Computational linguistics, but I'm fairly new to the Wikipedia, so I'm not sure.

CON -- see my suggestions under. --Thüringer ☼ (talk) 08:47, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

PRO  I have worked in CL/NLP for two decades, and as far as I am aware, there is no clear distinction in practice between CL and NLP, both have the same conferences, the same publications, the same research communities. In my opinion, it would be better to have one merged article, with mention of the different subfields within CL/NLP. Gor (talk) 06:45, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

PRO I work as a researcher in CL/NLP/Text Analytics/AI/Machine Learning/etc. I think CL and NLP should be merged, in the grand scheme of things, there is not much difference (if any). Either way, as I said under the CL article: It seems to me that the state of things is that the boundary between NLP and CL is unclear. I think the goal of any related Wikipedia articles should be to represent the state of things as accurately as possible, NOT to solve the clarity problem. Thus, both articles should clearly :) state that various opinions about these fields. Indquimal (talk) 23:15, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

PRO There might be a fine difference between NLP and CL but the difference is tiny and unclear. As some have mentioned, the term NLP is used more by people with Computer Science backgrounds and the term CL is used more by people with Linguistics background, also I believe that CL is somewhat more the theoretical side and NLP the practical side. However, you cannot do one without the other, all NLP applications are based on CL theory, and all CL research is based on experimenting with NLP applications.

CON It is important to keep them apart even if today they are both dominated by the computing-oriented approaches. NLP people generally don't have any formal background in Linguistics, and don't really know much about language (and virtually nothing about Linguistics), and the people tend to sit in Computer Science Departments. CL people have the formal background in Linguistics, and CL is often taught in Linguistics Departments along with the necessary computing skills. The aims of CL are to understand more about language, whilst the aims of NLP are to achieve specific performance goals in a computational context - e.g. specific computer applications, or as an abstract problem in machine learning. Both are valid approaches from their own disciplinary perspectives, but the current dominance of NLP tends to stifle CL. dP (ML/NL/AI/CogSci) (talk) 03:51, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

PRO This is misleading to have two pages for the same thing. At least at Paris III University, Master degrees in NLP/CL accept people with background in linguistic and math/cs. I think we should keep Computational Linguistics to avoid the confusion with the other NLP.i⋅am⋅amz3 (talk) 23:18, 17 March 2018 (UTC)

PRO I think they should be merged. Not that there are no differences, but at least, these differences (and overlaps) could be made transparent then. The Computational Linguistics page is comparably weak, and merging both would lead to a better article. Likewise, Language technology should be merged as well, for the same reasons. In either way, Both terms should be defined in their respective subsections after merge. Chiarcos (talk) 21:47, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

Content from The Natural Language Processing
I would like to mention my company, Creative Virtual, because we have over 10 years experience working with virtual assistant natural language web applications, and link to the automated online assistant page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.99.227.213 (talk) 20:46, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

I append the content from that page, in case anyone wants to merge it in here.

Charles Matthews 09:35, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

 The Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is inside the topic of the Artificial Intelligence and linguistics. It treats the problems inherent in the processing and manipulation of natural language.

Some examples of the major tasks in Natural Language Processing are:

 * Text to speech
 * Speech Recognitions
 * Natural language generation
 * Translation made by Machine
 * Question answering
 * Information retrieval
 * Information extraction
 * Text-proofing

Some problematic things in NLP are:

 Word boundary detection

In the known spoken language, there are no gaps between words; where to situate the word boundary many times depends on what choice makes the most sense grammatically and given the context.

 Word sense disambiguation

Any word that we can think of has many different meanings. That is why, we have to select the meaning which makes the most sense in our context.

– Sign Syntactic ambiguity

The grammar for natural languages is ambiguous. Selecting the most appropriate grammatical element requires semantic and contextual information.

Speech acts and plans

Sometimes what we write doesn't mean literaly what is written; for instance a good answer to "Can you give the pencil?" is to give the pencil; in most contexts "Yes" is not the best thing to answer; when you want to say literaly "No" it is better to say "I'm afraid that I can't see it".

Question edited into the article by User:129.27.236.115:
 * The Morphix-NLP link is not valid anymore. Does anybody know where to get Morphix-NLP?

Cadr

It is now. Yaron 22:40, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

Remove external link
Removed a spam link (several times) to a website called ivrdictionary. This is a thinly veiled attempt to put advertising on Wikipedia. Links were added by several anonymous users within a tight IP range. Website purports to list ivr terminology, but in reality it prominently displays an advertisement to Angel dot com, which is a commercial company that sells IVR related products. The same links were added to other articles that are related to IVR technology. Calltech 16:59, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Incorporate stemming?
I suggest adding a link to stemming in the see also or subtasks or challenges. I am not sure who is responsible for editing this article though, and I don't want to edit it myself without asking. Is stemming too detailed, or a subtask of another subtask only like IR? Not sure. I thought it was a pretty popular problem. Josh Froelich 19:46, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

"I am not sure who is responsible for editing this article though" You are, feel free to edit any wikipedia page. Yes it feels very wrong the first few time, but your fine to do so. Someone will fix it if your wrong anyhow. Scott A Herbert (talk) 13:56, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

I would disagree with the removal of links to software
I expected to find the word "software" to be used more than once on a topic like this. Software is sort of important in this field, and having a page that lists extant software (regardless of license) with a meaningful comparison of the various options (e.g. key features, license, programming language, APIs)

Maximum entropy methods
My vague understanding is that maximum entropy methods represent the state of the art in NLP these days; yet this article seems to fail to mention them. Could an expert clarify/elucidate? linas 13:17, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

 * If an article is lacking a notable subject, it's usually the case that nobody got around to adding it. Please be bold and add a review of maxent NLP stuff to the article as you see fit, remembering to cite your sources.  –jonsafari 20:47, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

 * In most subareas of current NLP, machine learning is at the core of most implementations. It's true that Maxent (or logistic regression, as it's also known) and its generalizations (e.g. Conditional random fields) usually perform well for these tasks, but they are not the only method. I'd say that margin-based methods such as Support Vector Machines are at least as popular. Anyway, it's more important to expand the section about machine learning/statistical modeling rather than just adding a section about Maxent. Kallerdis (talk) 19:43, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Human Language Technology
Does anyone feel it necessary to distinguish between NLP and HLT? If so, please visit that article—it desperately needs work. On the other hand, perhaps it should simply redirect here to the NLP article. —johndburger 02:47, 22 June 2007 (UTC)

Papers
The following were added to the External links section. Perhaps one or more might be used as a reference someday? --Ronz 17:36, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Goutam Kumar Saha, English to Bangla Translator: The BANGANUBAD, International Journal -CPOL, Vol.18(4), pp.281-290, December 2005, WSPC, USA.
 * Goutam Kumar Saha, Parsing Bengali Text - an Intelligent Approach, ACM Ubiquity, Vol. 7 Issue 13, April,  2006. ACM Press, USA.
 * Goutam Kumar Saha, The EB-ANUBAD Translator: A Hybrid Scheme, International Journal ZUS, Vol. 6A(10), ZUS Press, 2005.
 * Goutam Kumar Saha, A Novel 3-Tier XML Schematic Approach for Web Page Translation, ACM Ubiquity, Vol. 6(43), ACM Press, 2005, USA.

Add confusion about accenting words?
I was going to add this in, but I thought it might not be a good Idea. If you guys can incorporate it well and fit it in, please do: (I was going to put it after the 'I never said she stole my money' part.) Accenting words can be very helpful in giving meaning to a sentence that contains negatives, because the speaker is saying that a specific fact is not true, and usually something else without one expressed specific is. Sometimes accenting words in a sentence can still lead to confusion, like in "Go over there" because "over" is being used to describe the relative position of the destination, but when taken by itself, "over" means ontop of something. The accent in this case implies a literal meaning of the word...

24.250.97.223 (talk) 04:56, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

(NLU) Merge
PRO As stated on my talk page. Not much there but don't see anything here either so maybe better to do a little something here. Perhaps a § (NLU, Semantics, Discourse, Top Level Protocols, etc.) to which the NLU article can redirect. 74.78.162.229 (talk) 21:38, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

PRO Similarly to Computer linguistics, I think NLU should be merged into CL because all three of them deal with natural language comprehension by computers. i⋅am⋅amz3 (talk) 01:36, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

Rating and Importance
Set these to values that seemed reasonable to me and manually created the Comments page. 74.78.162.229 (talk) 22:01, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Clean-up/Major edit
As noted in the article header, this article needs major rewriting, restructuring and clean-up. Would anyone like to team up with me to get it done? I'm a wiki-novice but know a fair amount about NLP (and have plenty of references that I can consult). Sunfishy (talk) 17:39, 5 November 2008 (UTC)sunfishy

 * Yes, I can see the necessity, and I am willing to help. Let's perhaps start with a non-controversial, easy restructuring: The section Major tasks in NLP is quite a random list of NLP-related articles at the moment. I think it would be wise to differentiate between (1) NLP tasks in the sense of NLP modules a comprehensive NLP system can have (speech recognition, morphological analysis, NLU, word sense disambiguation, semantic role labeling, semantic interpretation, perhaps NLG), and (2) NLP applications such as those currently listed under this heading.
 * More generally, the relationship to Computational linguistics should finally be clarified. It is not a rare thing that industry uses terms different from academia, and in this case, I can see that it makes sense to have two articles. They should simply be linked to each other in a reasonable way, and then the big warning signs will no longer be necessary. This article could describe the applied side while Computational linguistics could focus on the theoretical underpinnings (which is already the case, by and large). --Thüringer ☼ (talk) 08:43, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

Subproblems
A significant subproblem not mentioned (directly) is that the great majority of people use words and grammar incorrectly. For example, one of the most frequently seen errors in written text is using "loose" for "lose", as in "Did anyone loose this book?". A typical grammatical error is a golf analyst talking about something being "between he and the hole" instead of "between the hole and him". In fact, if you listen to sportscasters on TV, hardly five minutes will go by without some kind of gross grammatical error or misuse of words. Tens of millions of people are often subjected to this for hours at a time, week after week, possibly having a negative effect on the way they speak.

Ironically, even the article is guilty of speech misuse under the "Subproblems: Speech acts and plans" heading where it says: ''"Can you pass the salt?" is requesting a physical action to be performed.'' Actually, the verb "can" means "able to" and as such, DOES request a yes or no answer rather than requesting a physical action. The correct, unambiguous wording is: "Please pass the salt." or at the very least: "Would you pass the salt, please." The question mark is intentionally not used because we are not really asking a question. Also notice that adding "please", like your mother surely told you, instantly clarifies that a physical action is being requested.

Speech is only half of communication; the other half is the cooperation of the listener in trying to understand what the speaker means regardless of errors in speech. So any computerized natural language processor must be programmed not only with proper grammar and word meanings, but also with the ability to recognize and correct for IMPROPER speech. Any NLP program which requires perfect word usage, spelling, and grammar is not going to work very well. 71.154.253.96 (talk) 14:02, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

Forgotten Merge? Better forgotten
I do not see a discussion of the July 2008 merge suggestion. Natural language understanding is a field unto itself, and I am going to rewrite that article 99.99999% and put a "main link" so there is really no need for a merge. This article is not in good shape either, but it is a much larger field and will need much more attention. It does have several good points in it, but overall a new computer science student would be well advised not to read it until it has been cleaned up. Unless there are objections I will remove the merge flag later. Cheers. History2007 (talk) 21:12, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

Section 'Concrete problems'
The second bullet point in the section 'Concrete problems' is copied verbatim from its source, http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0311.html?printable=1. Is there permission? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jann.poppinga (talk • contribs) 14:17, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

 * Good observation; thank you for pointing this out. I am working on this section and the problem should naturally drop out as the restructure progresses. TehMorp (talk) 14:55, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Sections 'Concrete Problems' and 'Major tasks'
When I began, concrete problems was essentially a list of largely unelucidated examples; It seems better to work the examples in with some level of explanation (or work some level of explanation in with the examples). I began to do that, and now I'm wondering whether ultimately it wouldn't be better to end up combining this section with the Major tasks section. What that would entail would be including examples along with appropriate tasks to illustrate why that particularly task isn't yet solved, or what's difficult about the task. There's one fairly rich example, the "time flies like an arrow" example, subparts of which could be used under several different problems, so perhaps this example would be set up at the beginning of the list and then different aspects of it referred to appropriately.

Alternately, it could be interesting to use the examples before the task list as sort of a teaser, a "this is what we have to deal with", followed by a sort of "because of that, these are tasks that must be handled" type thematic progression.

Opinions? TehMorp (talk) 15:04, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

I think that the 'Concrete Problems' section should be dropped. The "problems" all boil down to the same issue: not being able to determine the intended meanings of words outside of their context.

The letter "A" can have many different meanings: the first letter of the English alphabet, a musical note, a grade, etc., just as the phrase "pretty little girls' school" (or any of the other phrases given) can have any of the meanings shown in the section. In each case, the meaning should be determinable by the surrounding context. It is ridiculous to say that understanding such phrases is a problem any more than is understanding which meaning of "A" is intended when no context is given for either.

Determining the intended meanings of words based on their context is not a "problem" so much as it is the essential goal of NLP. This is not to say that there cannot be ambiguities resulting from poorly worded text, but when when an NLP program detects abiguities which cannot be resolved given the surrounding context, the simple solution is to request clarification from the source of the text. 75.46.215.114 (talk) 12:10, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

I did drop this section. It was repetitive and didn't seem especially useful. The section on tasks gives a fair amount of explanation of what the issues are for the individual tasks. For more examples, refer to the articles on specific tasks. Benwing (talk) 22:18, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Parsing weird
"And ALL fruit flies in the same manner - like bananas do;"

I don't think any program would parse "Time flies like an arrow" this way, given that neither "fruit" nor "bananas" appears in the source sentence. I suspect this was copied incorrectly, but the original link is now dead.

Should it read "And ALL time flies in the same manner - like an arrow does"? That's a pretty big change for a typo. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.163.72.2 (talk) 00:45, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Assessment comment
Substituted at 00:57, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

COI tag
What is the reason for this cleanup tag that you added to this article? Jarble (talk) 00:47, 8 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Well, I needed to inform the other editors somehow that NLPGuy is editing an article that is in violation of our COI policy. His COI edit was reverted by as a result. Since the editor have stopped his COI editing, I removed the tag, but thank you for notifying. :)--Biografer (talk) 01:26, 8 January 2018 (UTC)
 * On the other hand, I do see a lot of original research in this article, considering that some sections are not referenced, but I might be wrong.--Biografer (talk) 01:58, 8 January 2018 (UTC)

Major evaluations and tasks
I'm not happy with the mismatch between the Major_evaluations_and_tasks section (and subsections) and Category:Tasks_of_natural_language_processing. mendicott.com (talk) 19:10, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

Tried to systematize the Major_evaluations_and_tasks section a bit. Did not address mismatch with Category:Tasks_of_natural_language_processing. IMHO, this cannot be really resolved because the pages in the category focus have no consistent level of granularity. Chiarcos (talk) 20:41, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

Hyphen
Shouldn’t “natural-language processing” be written with a hyphen, as it means “processing of natural language”, not “natural processing of language”? palpalpalpal (talk) 19:20, 29 September 2019 (UTC)

 * By typical English grammar rules, yes. By typical NLP research parlance, no. I don't think it hurts to include the hyphen (I read an article recently where I saw it) but I also made the judgment call to leave the hyphen out on my résumé/CV as a signal, if that tells you anything (I do ML/NLP research). Dem1995 (talk) 20:06, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

No, conventional spelling is Natural Language Processing (with or without capitalization). Chiarcos (talk) 20:42, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

The current infobox image reinforces sexist stereotypes
The current image in the infobox in the top right shows an automated online assistant built (presumably) using NLP technologies. The problem is that it shows a cartoon woman as the assistant. Do we really want to reinforce the stereotype of women assistants by showing it as the first (and only) image for the NLP page on Wikipedia? NLP has a gender bias problem and this image only magnifies it (not to mention alienating women who might be interested in the field). I don't think this particular accurately reflects an application of NLP today in any case.

I don't have any suggestions for alternative images at the moment, but I feel that an infobox linking NLP to other research areas (Machine Learning, Computational Linguistics, etc) would be more appropriate. For example, look at the infobox for the Machine Learning page. Surely the NLP page can be part of some portal/series? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Venkatasg (talk • contribs) 20:07, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

Cognition
While the overlap between cognitive science and NLP (or CL) is important, indeed, this passage does not describe an NLP task and simply doesn't fit the overall text. Either revise and move to an independent section or remove it. I'm inclined to the latter because I see no way to repair that easily. Chiarcos (talk) 20:45, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

 * If this section on "Cognition" does not get deleted, at least one para needs editing badly. About the word 'big', it says "When used as a Stative verb, as in ”Tomorrow is a big day”."  But 'big' is not a verb at all, much less a stative verb. ('verb' is a grammatical category, not a semantic one, and 'big' doesn't take any tense/aspect/person marking like genuine English verbs do.  The recent coining 'embiggen' does take such verbal inflection, but it's not stative, and that's not the word in question here anyways.)  I'm on the verge of just deleting that para entirely, since its description of 'big' in the sentence "That is a big tree" as a comparative is also misleading, if not as plain wrong as calling it a verb in the other sentence.  (It is certainly not grammatically a comparative, and it's not clear in what other sense it might be a comparative.)  Nor is the content of the para attributed to any source, i.e. it seems like personal research.  But simply deleting the para would leave the surrounding paras without obvious rhetorical connection, so I'm reluctant to do so.Mcswell (talk) 16:25, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

 * I worked that comment in. I also tried to make some more sense of it, straightened the language and linked the Lakoff stuff with more recent developments. Originally, this was basically a Lakoff excerpt, but that wasn't obvious from the layout. I worked out that paragraph into a section on developmental trajectories (where it fits nicely, even though the Lakoff ideas are absolutely *not* what is driving that). In any case, I no longer consider this a candidate for deletion, but one may consider renaming that and describing other current tendencies in the field (other than methods, that is quite clear now from the revised history section). Chiarcos (talk) 20:38, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

Humanity and Sustainability
An experience towards humanity and all act that promotes human sustainability as ways of transforming human right act to reality including underprivileged communities and to have the greatest purpose by fighting against obstacles and challenges 41.223.132.196 (talk) 17:53, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

Disambiguation
For the disambiguation note at the top, there should be link to 'NLP' page 124.150.139.62 (talk) 00:21, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

title: Talk:Natural language processing