Proceedings of the 17th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics -

Abstract

The Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics offers the membership a chance to acknowledge and benefit from the wide range of developments in computational linguistics in the past several years. The papers in the program reflect the growing interaction between computational linguists trained in information processing approaches and those trained in linguistic disciplines. At the same time the program's papers report on new developments in many areas of computational linguistics that are now the forefront of research in our field.Because of the exponentially increasing number of papers submitted this year, the committee chose to reduce the number of panels and invited talks in favor of accepting additional papers. The panel on Directions for Natural Language Processing will provide the membership with a chance to assess current developments in the field and their potential for the next several years. The invited talk on Speech Act Theory will update the membership in depth on one part of our field that shows special promise for natural language processing. At the same time, this year's tutorials have been planned to provide the membership with lectures in areas of computational linguistics that complement those being studied during the courses at the 1987 Linguistic Institute at Stanford University.The Public Forum on Evaluating Natural Language Systems is a special part of this year's program. It permits all of the membership to participate in the examination of a set of issues that are pressing to every one in the community, no matter what their particular specialty may be. It is my hope that this forum will further research and practical measures on evaluating all aspects of natural language systems. The forum is also an experiment in programming for an annual meeting because of its unusual scheduling structure.