The 1969 international conference on computational linguistics: A progress report

Abstract

T 1969 International Conference on Computational Linguistics, held at S~nga-Siiby, Sweden, September 1-4, attracted participants from some 20 countries. The conference is noteworthy as evidence of a new trend in computational linguistics research, meriting the attention of scholars in the humanities. In recent years, linguistic theory has been characterized by a syntax-based orientation, which was at once an advance over previous linguistic theory and a misunderstanding of the more basic role of semantics. The centrality of syntax in linguistic theory greatly influenced developments in computational linguistics, where research efforts were concentrated on parsing strategies and the aptly named "algebraic linguistics," with semantics playing a very subsidiary role. Such a bias does not reflect a proper assessment of the role of semantics in the analysis of natural-language text, whether by computer or by humans. Viewed as a problem in artificial intelligence, automatic analysis and representation of the content of natural-language text can be defined as a process by which the computer "understands" the input data. The process of understanding involves identification of the concepts contained in the text as well as the relations obtaining between these concepts; this information must then be explicitly represented in some standard form. The formal representation serves as the basis for further operations on the text-for example, automatic abstracting, questionanswering, translation, stylistic analysis, etc. Because of the bias toward syntax, the attention of most investigators in computational linguistics throughout its brief history has been focused on a single dimension of the relations between concepts. The other aspects of the problem-namely, explication of the concepts themselves and encoding of this information in some formal languagehave been largely ignored. Quite recently, there has been increasing concern with the role of semantics and with the problem of specifying a formalism for semantic representation; this concern is reflected in the contributions to the 1969 computational linguistics conference. Of the 71 papers accepted for presentation, almost a third deal with some aspect of the much-neglected semantic dimension of language. Since it is this topic which is likely to be