Applied Computational Linguistics in Perspective: 
Proceedings of the Workshop 
Carroll Johnson 1 
Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence 
Navy Research Laboratory 
Washington, D.C. 20375 
Joan Bachenko 
Naval Research Laboratory 
Washington, D.C. 20375 
0. INTRODUCTION 
Of the various subdisciplines in Artificial Intelli- 
gence, only a few have matured to the state that prac- 
tical application seems imminent. Of these, computa- 
tional linguistics appears to be a leading contender for 
real world applications in the immediate future. One 
area of special interest to the Naval Research Labora- 
tory (NRL) is the application of computational linguis- 
tics in automated message systems. 
The scheduled meeting of the ACL at Stanford 
University June 29-July 1, provided an opportunity for 
a workshop June 26-27 at Stanford. The workshop, 
"Applied Computational Linguistics in Perspective", 
was organized in May 1981 as a joint effort by NRL, 
ACL, and the National Science Foundation (NSF), 
with funding provided by the Office of Naval Research 
(ONR). The goal of the workshop was to establish an 
informed consensus on realistic expectations for ap- 
plied computational linguistics within a five year time 
frame. The workshop program committee, consisting 
of Carroll Johnson, Chairman (NRL Visiting Scien- 
tist), Joan Bachenko (NRL), Henry Hamburger 
(NSF), and Norman Sondheimer (Sperry Univac), 
invited five panel chairmen who in turn invited the 
members of their respective panels. 
Discussions with several individuals from ONR, 
DARPA, NSF, and the Air Force Office of Scientific 
Research (AFOSR) helped focus the choice of panel 
topics. These topics mapped remarkably well onto the 
problem of developing automated message systems. 
Therefore, this problem was used as a general theme 
for the workshop discussions. 
In general, the message systems problem concerns 
the distribution of information among message senders 
and recipients, where the information encoded in a 
message is coordinated and augmented by a dynamic 
knowledge base that represents the current operational 
situation. Incoming messages update the knowledge 
base, which may modify the address, the priority, or 
even the content of a message before the message is 
disseminated. Such a system might use computational 
linguistics in several ways. For example, maintaining 
an updated dynamic situation model requires a human 
supervisor who can monitor the system's conclusions 
and override its decisions, when necessary. A Natural 
Language Interface between the situation model data- 
base and the person in charge thus provides one appli- 
cation for computational linguistics. If updating re- 
quires that a message be modified, Text Generation 
provides a second application area in which computa- 
tional linguistic techniques might be used to rewrite 
portions of a message or to append an update note. A 
third application area is Concept Extraction, which 
extracts information from an incoming message and 
builds a suitable knowledge base representation. A 
fourth area, Machine Translation, may increase the 
effectiveness of multinational operations where the 
native language of a message originator differs from 
that of a message recipient. Finally, studies in Sublan- 
guage provide a linguistic foundation for each of these 
applications. 
Copyright 1982 by the Association for Computational Linguistics. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted 
provided that the copies are not made for direct commercial advantage and the Journal reference and this copyright notice are included on 
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0362-613X/82/020055-31 $03.00 
t Visiting Scientist from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 1981. 

