In Memory of Professor Ján Horecký - A Personal Recollection

Facing a second major event of computational linguistics in Prague in the history of Czech CL – the ACL Annual Meeting in June 2007 – we cannot leave the first such event – COLING 1982 – unmentioned. But alas – most unfortunately, we have to start with very sad news about the then President of the Congress, Professor Ján Horecký, who died on August 11th, 2006 in his hometown Stupava (near Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia). We have been cherishing the hope that Professor Horecký will join us to see the fruit of his courageous initiative at the end of the seventies, but instead we have to put our expressions of gratefulness just on paper. Why have we written ‚courageous‘? For those who are too young to remember those times, and for those who lived under different circumstances, we must elucidate the political context. Computational linguistics in Prague, though having achieved a considerable international recognition already in the sixties and seventies, did not have easy life after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968; the Laboratory of Algebraic Linguistics belonging then to the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University and headed by Petr Sgall, was dissolved as a politically unreliable institute, since none of its members agreed to take part in the political surges which were prepared. Only thanks to the efforts of some of our colleagues at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University, the members of the Lab were transferred (as individuals rather than as a group) to a less ideologically supervised Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. However, even there, the Communist Party decision was valid for ten years that computational linguists had no political perspectives and as such should be expelled from the University. Nevertheless, we did not give up: we could not teach, supervise doctoral students, or attend conferences abroad; but we carried out our research (sometimes “hidden” under some applied projects) and, first of all, we tried hard to keep our contacts with the CL community abroad. As members of the International Committee of Computational Linguistics, we felt extremely honored when in 1978 the President of the Committee, the late Professor Bernard Vauquois from Grenoble, expressed the wish of the Committee to hold one of the COLING conferences in Prague; in addition to the recognition of the results of the CL researchers in our country and, of course, the attractiveness of Prague, one of the reasons was the assumption that for researchers from the communist countries it would be easier to attend a conference held in a country belonging to the same political sphere. We had no idea how to persuade our authorities to give their permission to do that, but as our leading slogan had always been “do not give up unless you try all possible (and impossible) steps”, I gathered all my diplomatic skills and approached with Vauqouis proposal the then Vice-Dean of the Faculty responsible for foreign contacts. As expected, she quickly turned our initiative down, but (apparently?) to keep her face as a person who does her best to meet the wishes of a respectable Professor from France, she said in passing: “But if you find some political guarantee (read: a respected Communist Party official), the Faculty might consider to act as a co-organizer.” At first sight, this was a clearly impossible task. At second thought, Petr Sgall suggested: “And what if we ask Professor Horecký from Bratislava to help us?” This seemed to be more a joke than a real suggestion: Professor Horecký was a leading Slovak linguist, with a very broad range of linguistic and cultural interests (mathematical linguistics being one of them), he was one of the few Party