A SOCIETY IN TRANSITION 
Donald E. Walker 
Artificial Intelligence Center 
SRI International 
Menlo Park, California 94025, USA 
I was President in 1968, the year during 
which the Association for Machine Translation and 
Computational Linguistics became the Association 
for Computational Linguistics. Names always 
create controversy, and the founding name, 
selected in 1962, was chosen in competition with 
others, not the least of which was the one that 
subsequently replaced it. In fact, a change of 
name to the Association for Computational 
Linguistics was actually approved in 1963, at what 
has been described as an "unofficial meeting." 
However, that action was subsequently ruled out of 
order, since it did not result from a 
constitutional amendment. Five years later, 
proper procedure having been followed, the change 
was made officially. 
The organizational impetus for the 
establishment of the Association did came 
primarily from a group of people who had been 
working on machine translation. However, as in 
most scientific societies, there has always been-- 
and probably always will be--a tension between 
research and applicatlons. The primary motivation 
for the name change in 1968 was the recognition, 
shared but by no means universal, that we needed 
to address more basic issues first. The report on 
Language and Machines: Computers in Translation 
Linguistics by the Automatic Language 
Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) in 1966 
became a focal point for this controversy. It was 
viewed by translation specialists as an attack on 
their work, and it certainly resulted in dramatic 
reductions in funding for machine translation. 
However, its authors claim it was intended as an 
argument for increased support of research. 
Certainly, the lead article in the October- 
November 1966 issue of The Finite String, which 
was titled "Potential Bright for Language-Analysis 
by Computer; NRC Report Urges Support," presented 
that view. In any case, the argument that 
computational linguistics "should be supported as 
a science and should not be Judged by any 
immediate or foreseeable contributions to 
practical translation" seemed to frighten rather 
than challenge the funding agencies in the 
immediately following years. 
Another factor motivating the change of name 
in 1968 was the appreciation of the potential for 
the use of computational linguistics in 
information retrieval and in stylistic analysis. 
~.~nanical translation was only one of a number of 
exciting application areas. During that year, I 
spent a substantial amount of time coordinating 
with the Special Interest Group on Information 
Retrieval (SIGIR) and the Special Interest 
Committee on Language Analysis and Studies in the 
Humanities (SICLASH), both of the Association for 
Computing Machinery, and with the Special Interest 
Group on Automated Language Processing (SlGALP) of 
the American Society for Information Science. 
There were also meetings with the Linguistic 
Society of America, the Modern Language 
Association, and the Center for Applied 
Linguistics. In addition, during the year, ACL 
became a constituent society of the American 
Federation of Information Processing Societies 
(AFIPS), of which it had been first an unofficial 
and then an official "observer" since 1964. I was 
the first ACL member of the Board of Directors, 
and I became actively involved in a number of its 
committees, most particularly the one on 
Information Systems. I also became the ACL 
representative to the newly formed International 
Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and, 
subsequently, Program Chairman of its first 
meeting in 1969. 
These organizational relationships, coupled 
with my own tendency toward global perspectives, 
led me to view the ACL as a central point around 
which everything else revolved. In computational 
linguistics, there are aspects of science, 
engineering, the humanities, the social and 
behavioral sciences, education, and 
communications. I contemplated the time when, in 
addition to being members of AFIPS, our 
Association would be equally implicated in the 
American Association for the Advancement of 
Science, the American Council of Learned 
Societies, and the Social Science Research 
Council. And I only regretted that at that time 
there were no aggregate groups for education, and 
communications to round out the picture. 
This "message" was the substance of my 
Presidential address. I tried to leaven it with a 
little humor to make it more palatable, but I 
remember the banquet which preceded it (prepared 
by the University of lllinois 1111ni Union) as the 
most horrible meal the ACL has ever had to 
confront. I am sure that the failure of the 
members attendant to rally to my cause and carry 
my message to the multitudes (or even to Garcia) 
was due in no small measure to the poor quality of 
the food. 
But let me return briefly to name changes and 
to the tension between research and applications. 
During our discussions about the forthcoming 
Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, 
which the ACL will be cosponsoring with the Naval 
Research Laboratory, 1-3 February 1983, in Santa 
98 
Monlca, we considered calling it "Conference on 
Applied Computational Linguistics." However, it 
became clear that we could not expect to have as 
broadly based a meeting as we wanted with that 
name. It is important now to reach out to the 
larger community. Once we have them listening to 
us, it will be all right for them to find out that 
they have been "practicing computational 
linguistics all their (professional) lives!" 
Fascinated as I am about the applicability of 
computational linguistics for its own sake, what I 
find most exciting is the value that the use of 
our systems will have for deepening our insights 
into the basic research issues that still face us. 
I believe that studying people "organizing and 
using information" on the kinds of systems we are 
now beginning to develop can revolutlonlze our 
understanding of what we do and do not know about 
computational linguistics, as well as guide the 
improvement of our systems more effectively 
(Walker, 1971, 1972, in press). 
Walker, DE. "The Organization and Use of 
Information: Contributions of Information 
Science, Computational Linguistics and 
Artificial Intelligence. Journal of the 
American Society for Information Science 1981, 
32:347-363. 
Walker, D. "Natural-Language-Access Systems and 
the Organization and Use of Information." In 
COLING 82: Proceedings of the Ninth 
International Conference on Computatlonal 
Linguistlcs. North-Holland Publishlng Company, 
Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1982. 
Walker, DE. "Computational Strategies for 
Analyzing the Organization and Use of 
Information." In Knowledge Structure and Use: 
Perspectives o_~n Synthesis and Interpretation. 
Edited by S Ward and L Reed. National 
Institute of Education, Washington, D.C., in 
cooperation with CEMREL, Inc., St. Louis, 
Missouri (in press). 
REFERENCES 
Automatic Language Processlng Advisory Cor.m/ttee. 
Languages and Machines: Computers inn 
Translatlon and Linguistics° National Academy 
of Sciences, National Research Council, 
Publlcatlon 1416, Washington, D.C., 1966. 
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