Panel: Development of Computational Linguistics Research: A Challenge for Indonesia

The emergence of Internet as a global information repository, where information of all kind is stored, requires intelligent information processing tools (i.e., computer applications) to help the information seeker to retrieve the stored information. To build these intelligent information processing tools, we need to build computer applications that understand human language since most of those information is represented in human language. This is where computational linguistics becomes important, especially for countries like Indonesia that hosts more than 200 million people. We need to develop a systematic understanding of the Bahasa Indonesia (the Indonesian national language) to enable us develop the needed computer applications that will help us manage information intelligently. However, until recently, there is only a few research activities in computational linguistics conducted in Indonesia. The establishment of Computer Science departments in Indonesian universities that did not start until the beginning of 1980’s may be partially responsible for this. In addition, the Indonesian linguists seem to be keen on working “manually” instead of using computers in conducting their linguistics researches as stated in Muhadjir (1995), only few of them really make use of the technology. While, on the other hand, most computer scientists tend to use the practical approach rather than constructing a complete framework to understand the language when building related applications such as a specific information retrieval system. In the following, I will describe past research activities in computational linguistics