It is not clear why there has not already been much activity in integrating NLP and VP. Is it because of the long-time reductionist trend in science up until the recent emphasis on chaos theory, non-linear systems, and emergent behaviour? Or, is it because the people who have tended to work on NLP tend to be in other Departments, or of a different ilk, to those who have worked on VP?
NLP and VP can be integrated into a single model and computer system architecture. An application domain is that of reconstructing complex blood vessel structures called vasculatures. The proposed architecture incorporates a single knowledge representation for representing knowledge about blood vessel structures. The input to the system will be in the form of X-ray angiograms and clinical reports associated with those angiograms.
The integration of vision and language processing has implications for artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, and computer science.