Empirical Semantics and Computational Linguistics ∗

The history of literary and linguistic text processing by computers can be traced back to the late-50s in West Germany. After a short review of the development of computational linguistics in West Germany, this paper will be devoted mainly to those present traits in the field which appear to combine promising components likely to become seminal in the future for a wide range of disciplines in the human sciences and beyond. Most prominent in this respect are recent achievements which have occurred somewhat simultaneously within the intersection of cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence and empirical linguistics. In these fields scholars are engaged in researching different aspects of the problems and processes of natural language understanding. Although these differ by discipline, their aspects apparently share some common interests as well as a commonality of approach. Both might be keyworded as the procedural notion of knowledge, memory, and meaning conveyed by natural language processing through a cognitive activity of human or artificial systems. Thus, the representation of knowledge, the understanding of meanings, and the analysis of texts, have become focal areas of mutual interest whose computational (preferably dynamic) modeling obviously serves to unify descriptive, explicative, simulative purposes at stake. With regard both to the prospects of new technological achievements and to the potential benefits or detriments that these achievements could imply, cognitive theory