Ongoing directions in Computational Linguistics

For those who, like me, have been associated with these meetings since tile beginning, it is a privilege and an enormous pleasure to return to France, and to u conference organized under the auspices of the University of Grenoble. it is too little recognized how much the field of comlmtational linguistics owes to this country and to that university. My predecessor, the second chairman of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics, the late Professor Bernard Vauquois and tile machine translation center that he founded in Greooble, have done more to shape our field than any other single person or center. They were the only major academic research group to live through the dark ages that followed the ALPAC report and their Ariune system has become ttle model for the great majority of the commercial machine translation systems that have ever been built. Professor Vauquois, and his students and colleagues have been missionaries for, anti tireless teachers of, computational linguistics for thirty years, establishing new research centers as far away as Malaysia.