I have not been following this series of messages very carefully
since I was away, but perhaps it would be useful to say (with the risk
of sounding out-of-date! ) that in 1995 there were 2 interesting fora
which discussed what ‘Language Engineering’ is.
At the 1995 International Summer School “Contemporary topics in
Computational Linguistics” which took place in Bulgaria, a panel
discussion (with panelists Joshi, Tsujii, Matsumoto, Yusoff,
Key-sun Choi and Mitkov) was organised which aimed at
clarifying the concept ‘Language Engineering’. A few months later
(December 1995) an NLPRS’95 post-workshop on Language Engineering
took place in Seoul. Among the contributions were those by Changning Huang,
Jun-itchi Tsujii and Ruslan Mitkov which focused on defining what
‘Language Engineering’ is and touched on the common points and differences
between Computational Linguistics (CL) and Language Engineering (LE).
I shall be happy to provide copies of slides or written up papers, if anyone
is interested.
By and large I agree with G Sampson that CL is more academic and that LE
is more ‘practical’ and ‘industrial’. (Actually, this was my 1995 view
I have not thought more about it after that.) In addition, my view was that LE
and CL
are mutually complementary and should go hand in hand. Also, I thought that LE
is a meeting point of academic research and industry in the field (as
encouraged
by the EC LE schemes): LE makes industry more academic and academic
research more industrial.
I agree that the editorial of the Journal of NLE provides a very good
explanation as to what LE represents.
\\\ Ruslan Mitkov, PhD
/// Professor of Computational Linguistics and Language Engineering
\\\ School of Humanities, Languages and Social Studies (Wolverhampton)
/// University of Wolverhampton
\\\ Stafford St.
/// Wolverhampton WV1 1SB
\\\ United Kingdom
/// Telephone (44-1902) 322471
\\\ Fax (44-1902) 322739
/// Email R.Mitkov@wlv.ac.uk
\\\ Website http://www.wlv.ac.uk/~le1825/
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