Introduction: Cognitive Issues in Natural Language Processing

From the very beginning, pioneers in computer sciences have tried to establish a link between practical issues and more fundamental ones, like language processing in the brain, knowledge representation or the nature of communication. Modeling language was supposed to open a window on the brain, or at least give an idea of how things can be processed by the brain. The famous Turing Test (?; ?) itself was not directly about language modeling, but mimicking a conversation through a computer that was considered as a proof of intelligence, i.e. the fact that computers could interpret utterances, infer new information and produce relevant responses.