On the Present

There are certainly many reasons. One is the attractiveness of our most abstract theories. They are widely presented and receive the most scholarly attention. The popular and technical press contributes by pub1~cizing our w~]der claims and broadest hopes. ~imilar]y, the press oversells our current systems, leading more careful observers to wonder even about these. Finally, mechanizing the understanding of natural language ~s very difficult. We can not hope to achieve many of our goals in the near future. Making do with the technology now available is very frustrating. All this contributes to we the members of the field gravitating to theorizing and small laboratory studies. We are choosing to focus on the £uture rather than the present. There is a real danger in this state of affairs. The build up of public and institutional expectations without a corresponding emergence of useful systems will produce a counter reaction. We have seen it before. To this day, machine translation research in the United States has not completely recovered. There is more need than ever~ there is more technology than before, word processing and computer typesetting have changed the price equation, but it is stilS not considered wise to be associated with MT. We can not let this sort of reversal happen to us again. Fortunately, we need not.