About Paul
Dr. Paul Rodrigues is the Natural Language Processing Science Director and a senior principal data scientist at Accenture Federal Services, where he develops applied natural language processing (NLP) systems, leading interdisciplinary teams of computer scientists, programmers, subject matter experts, psychologists, language experts, and linguists to brainstorm, build, and deliver customer-oriented solutions. He supports NLP client delivery, pre-sale and post-sale client discussions, research initiatives, recruiting, staffing, and proposal development. He has served as a Principal Investigator for 10 federally funded research projects, authored over 25 peer reviewed research papers and over 20 long form client-focused research technical reports. Before joining Accenture, Dr. Rodrigues was Associate Research Scientist at the University of Maryland Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence & Security, where he led a program in social media NLP, focusing on political sentiment analysis and cultural narrative identification. He has a Ph.D. in Linguistics (Computational) from Indiana University, a M.A. in Computational Linguistics, and a B.S. in Computer Science.
About NLP
NLP calls for teaching a computer how to understand language and using that understanding to add value. You likely use NLP everyday by way of search engines, spell checkers, spam filters, and machine translation or speech recognition systems. Platforms like Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana utilize NLP as their primary way of interacting with users, and at many levels underneath. Organizations may be interested in NLP to sort, search, and filter large amounts of data. They may use sentiment analysis to monitor their brand, to understand what customers enjoy about their products or services, and to identify what the organization needs to adjust.