THE FINITE STRING NEWSLETTER 
SITE REPORT 
LANGUAGE IN THE COMPUTER AGE 
A NOTE ON CURRENT ACTIVITIES 
IN COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS IN GERMANY 
Dafydd Gibbon 
Umiversity of Bielefeld 
A recent dramatic increase in activities in computa- 
tional linguistics in the German Federal Republic 
prompts this note. In particular, considerable attention 
has been focused on the major event in this field during 
the last few years, the three-week SiC Summer School 
("Sprache im Computerzeitalter" -- "Language in the 
Computer Age") organized in Munich in September 
1986 by the German Linguistics Society (Deutsche 
Gesellschaft fuer Sprachwissenschaft, DGfS), and at- 
tended by 260 linguists, including students, faculty 
members, and representatives of industrial research and 
development departments. 
A mark of the importance attributed to the field, and 
of the impact of this Summer School, is the inauguration 
of a "Sektion Computerlinguistik" in the DGfS during 
its Annual Meeting in March 1987, with the aim of 
providing an official German partner in computational 
linguistics for internationally oriented research, under 
the auspices of the official representative body for 
linguistics in Germany. This initiative was supported by 
37 eminent theoretical and computational linguists on 
the staffs of German universities and industrial R&D 
departments. The Society considered the time to be ripe 
for such a step, which would provide official represen- 
tation in a linguistic context for researchers in compu- 
tational linguistic questions but working in other fields, 
such as applied linguistics (by the "Gesellschaft fuer 
Angewandte Linguistik"), phonetic speech signal proc- 
essing, or language data processing (in the "Gesells- 
chaff fuer linguistische Datenverarbeitung"). 
A small amount of background information may help 
to put these recent developments into perspective. A 
distinction will be made for this purpose between four 
related fields, three of which were in focus at the SiC 
Summer School: 
1. Computational linguistics (as a branch of theoret- 
ical linguistics); 
2. Natural language processing in artificial intelli- 
gence contexts; 
3. Linguistic data processing (as a source of tools for 
text documentation and analysis in the human- 
ities); 
4. Signal processing (analysis and synthesis) in pho- 
netics, with recently developed connections to 
problems in phonological and prosodic parsing and 
generation. 
The early predominance of linguistic data processing 
("linguistische Datenverarbeitung") has been relati- 
vized in Germany, as elsewhere, by the increase in 
importance of the other three fields during the past 
decade, which was inevitably reflected in the SiC 
courses. 
An interesting feature of the German scene, perhaps 
explicable in terms of the Whorfian hypothesis, and at 
any rate reflected in the title of the school, is the loan 
translation "Computerlinguistik" for "computational 
linguistics." The more abstract, theoretical sense of 
"computational" tends to play second fiddle; "comput- 
ability," as a central notion, is "Berechenbarkeit," 
though no-one would (I hope) dream of referring to 
"Berechnungslinguistik." However, the term tends to 
364 Computational Linguistics, Volume 13, Numbers 3-4, July-December 1987 
The Finite String Newsletter Announcements 
cloud the boundaries between the areas mentioned 
above even more than usual. 
Historically, the current upsurge of interest in com- 
putational linguistics is, then, partly associated with the 
factor of rising general interest in concrete applications 
of computers, particularly microcomputers, with the 
idea that experience in language-oriented computer 
applications may be a useful kind of qualification for 
language and linguistics graduates in an age when 
traditional occupations such as state school language 
teaching are on the decline. 
Another pragmatic factor is the current demand for 
research and development in natural language oriented 
branches of AI, in particular for German natural lan- 
guage access systems for databases and expert systems 
and in the context of machine translation, activities 
which have been increasing in importance over the past 
ten years in German universities, industry and in fund- 
ing policy. 
A factor which has perhaps contributed less to cur- 
rent interest than it has elsewhere is theoretical linguis- 
tics, with an interest in computational properties of 
natural languages, and in developments and controver- 
sies which have motivated the development of compu- 
tational tools for the development and testing of linguis- 
tic descriptions. During the past decade, linguistics in 
Germany has been strongly descriptive, with emphasis 
on empirical and interpretative research in fields such as 
sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and language acqui- 
sition, with less emphasis on the formal properties of 
language structures and processes. The inauguration of 
the "Sektion Computerlinguistik" in the DGfS has 
re-affirmed the importance of such issues, however. 
A more detailed understanding of current interests 
may be gleaned from the SiC Summer School pro- 
gramme. Five types of events were offered: thematic 
courses, intensive practical programming courses in 
LISP and PROLOG (elementary and advanced), a lec- 
ture cycle by course teachers, invited and guest lec- 
tures, and panel discussions. Munich in September also 
offered a limitless range of additional activities, of 
course. 
The courses were held by Hans Altmann and Joa- 
chim Jacobs (Munich), Rainer Baeuerle (Tuebingen), 
Robin Cooper (Madison & Edinburgh), Konrad Ehlich 
(Dortmund) and Jochen Rehbein (Hamburg), Hans- 
Juergen Eikmeyer (Bielefeld), Elisabet Engdahl (Mad- 
ison & Lund), Guenter Goerz (Erlangen), Helmar Gust 
(Osnabrueck), Christopher Habel (Hamburg), Hans 
Haugeneder and Manfred Gehrke (Siemens, Munich), 
Roland Hauser (Munich), Wolfgang Hoeppner (Ham- 
burg, Koblenz), Werner Kasllmeyer (Mannheim), Mar- 
tin Kay (Xerox Palo Alto), James Kilbury (Trier), 
Juergen Krause (Regensburg), Wolfgang Kreitmair 
(Tuebingen), Michael Keoenig (Berlin), Sebastian 
Loebner (Dusseldorf), Katharina Morik (Berlin), Peter 
Sells (CSLI Stanford), Hans Guenther Tillman & Lies- 
lotte Schiefer (Munich), Hans Uszkoreit (IBM Stuttgart 
and Stanford), Dietmar Zaefferer (Munich), and Annie 
Zaenen (CSLI Stanford). 
There was a wide range of topics, from more specif- 
ically descriptive and theoretical linguistics topics like 
"Syntax and Intonation," "Quantification," "Ana- 
phora," and "Discourse Analysis" to contemporary 
linguistic theories (in particular GPSG, LFG, GB) and 
computational linguistic questions of parsing, unifica- 
tion, simulation, linguistic formalisms, with linguisti- 
cally relevant AI topics such as knowledge representa- 
tion or question-answer systems, and finally signal 
processing in experimental phonetics. 
In addition to lectures by SiC course teachers, in- 
vited lectures were given on computational linguistic 
and AI NL topics by Lauri Karttunen (Stanford), Henk 
Zeevat (Edinburgh), Jun-Ichi Tsujii (Kyoto), Petr Sgali 
(Prague), Egbert Lehmann (Siemens Munich), Claus 
Rainer Rollinger (IBM Stuttgart), Jaap Hoepelman 
(Fraunhofer Gesellschaft Stuttgart), and Thomas 
Christaller (Gesellschaft fuer Mathematik und Datenve- 
rarbeitung St. Augustin). 
The range of courses was rather wide; nevertheless, 
there remained sufficient coherence for students to be 
able to construct individual programmes, consisting as a 
rule of four of the courses (two hours, every other day) 
with complementary and interconnected topics. The 
present writer's selection was Kay on "Unification 
Grammar," Kilbury on "Parsing in PROLOG," Usz- 
koreit on GPSG and, further afield, Tiilmann and 
Schiefer on "Signal Processing in Experimental Phonet- 
ics." Reactions to the courses were varied, of course, 
and tended to be polar and "Relevanz" oriented; not a 
few participants were dismayed at finding so much 
theoretical linguistics and so few recipes for instant NL 
systems. 
But the impact of the SiC Summer School on German 
linguistics has already been considerable and positive, 
not least in re-encouraging work among German lin- 
guists in fundamental theoretical questions about lan- 
guage and computability, and fostering an awareness of 
the importance of "useful formalisms." The effect of 
the Summer School will undoubtedly continue to be felt 
in the coming years. 
CONFERENCE ON 
THEORETICAL ASPECTS OF REASONING ABOUT 
KNOWLEDGE 
6-9 March 1988, Asilomar Conference Center, Monterey, 
California 
SPONSORED BY: The IBM Corporation and the 
American Association for Artificial Intelligence. 
While traditionally research in this area was mainly 
done by philosophers and linguists, reasoning about 
knowledge has been shown recently to be of great 
Computational Linguistics, Volume 13, Numbers 3-4, July-December 1987 365 
