ON THE PRESENT 
Norman K. Sondheimer 
Sperry Univac 
Blue Bell, PA 19424 USA 
The Association for Computational Linguistics 
is twenty years old. We have much to be proud of: 
a fine journal, significant annual meetings, and a 
strong presence in the professional community. 
Computational Linguistics, itself, has much to be 
proud of: influence in the research community, 
courses in universities, research support in 
government and industry, and attention in the 
popular press. 
Not to spoil the fun, but the same was true 
twenty years ago and the society and the field has 
had to go through some difficult times since then. 
To be sure, much has changed. The ACL has over 
1200 members. Computational Linguistics has many 
new facets and potential applications. However to 
an outsider, we still appear to be a field with 
potential rather than one with achievement. Why 
is that? 
There are certainly many reasons. One is the 
attractiveness of our most abstract theories. 
They are widely presented and receive the most 
scholarly attention. The popular and technical 
press contributes by pub1~cizing our w~\]der claims 
and broadest hopes. ~imilar\]y, the press 
oversells our current systems, leading more 
careful observers to wonder even about these. 
Finally, mechanizing the understanding of natural 
language ~s very difficult. We can not hope to 
achieve many of our goals in the near future. 
Making do with the technology now available is 
very frustrating. All this contributes to we the 
members of the field gravitating to theorizing and 
small laboratory studies. We are choosing to 
focus on the £uture rather than the present. 
There is a real danger in this state of 
affairs. The build up of public and institutional 
expectations without a corresponding emergence of 
useful systems will produce a counter reaction. 
We have seen it before. To this day, machine 
translation research in the United States has not 
completely recovered. There is more need than 
ever~ there is more technology than before, word 
processing and computer typesetting have changed 
the price equation, but it is stilS not considered 
wise to be associated with MT. We can not let 
this sort of reversal happen to us again. 
Fortunately, we need not. 
We do have substantial achievements. Over 
the years, we have produced or bad influence on 
useful systems for information storage and 
retrieval, speech understanding and generation, 
and document processing. Natural language 
interfaces to databases are just now reaching the 
market. There are even limited but useful machine 
translation systems. There is more that we all 
know can and will be done in these areas. 
This will not be easy. We must accept the 
compromises forced on us by our limited 
technology. We must accept the unglamorous work 
that needs to be done. We must be careful in the 
way we present our work. 
It will not be all bad. There appear to be 
some attractive financia\] returns. These are not 
to be ignored. In fact, it would probably do us 
all good if Computational Linguistics ~ad a few 
millionaires to its credit. 
We must congratulate ourselves on twenty 
years of life, but we must also work hard to carry 
off a~other twenty years. I am sure we will. 
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