NLP Technologies in Question Answerers and Voice Assistants

Question answerers and voice assistants are two of the most important NLP applications. The former aims at providing precise, direct answers answers to users questions. The latter goes a step further by not only figuring out the semantic interpretation of a request, but also execute a sequence of actions to fulfil the request on the user's behalf. Both applications require their NLP components to be precise, robust, as well as efficient. I will survey and discuss the NLP technologies used in these two applicaitons