Machine translation. Work on machine translation began in the late 1950s with high hopes and little realization of the difficulties involved. Problems in machine translation stimulated work in both linguistics and computational linguistics, including some of the earliest parsers. Extensive work was done in the early 1960s, but a lack of success, and in particular a realization that fully-automatic high-quality translation would not be possible without fundamental work on text ‘understanding’, led to a cutback in funding. Only a few of the current projects in computational linguistics in the United States are addressed toward machine translation, although there are substantial projects in Europe and Japan (Slocum 1984, 1985; Tucker 1984).

Information retrieval. Because so much of the information we use appears in natural language form – books, journals, reports another application in which interest developed was automatic information retrieval from natural language texts. […]