Site Report - Linguistics In Germany

A recent dramatic increase in activities in computational linguistics in the German Federal Republic prompts this note. In particular, considerable attention has been focused on the major event in this field during the last few years, the three-week SiC Summer School ("Sprache im Computerzeitalter" "Language in the Computer Age") organized in Munich in September 1986 by the German Linguistics Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Sprachwissenschaft, DGfS), and attended by 260 linguists, including students, faculty members, and representatives of industrial research and development departments. A mark of the importance attributed to the field, and of the impact of this Summer School, is the inauguration of a "Sektion Computerlinguistik" in the DGfS during its Annual Meeting in March 1987, with the aim of providing an official German partner in computational linguistics for internationally oriented research, under the auspices of the official representative body for linguistics in Germany. This initiative was supported by 37 eminent theoretical and computational linguists on the staffs of German universities and industrial R&D departments. The Society considered the time to be ripe for such a step, which would provide official representation in a linguistic context for researchers in computational linguistic questions but working in other fields, such as applied linguistics (by the "Gesellschaft fuer Angewandte Linguistik"), phonetic speech signal processing, or language data processing (in the "Gesellschaff fuer linguistische Datenverarbeitung"). A small amount of background information may help to put these recent developments into perspective. A distinction will be made for this purpose between four related fields, three of which were in focus at the SiC Summer School: 1. Computational linguistics (as a branch of theoretical linguistics); 2. Natural language processing in artificial intelligence contexts; 3. Linguistic data processing (as a source of tools for text documentation and analysis in the humanities); 4. Signal processing (analysis and synthesis) in phonetics, with recently developed connections to problems in phonological and prosodic parsing and generation. The early predominance of linguistic data processing ("linguistische Datenverarbeitung") has been relativized in Germany, as elsewhere, by the increase in importance of the other three fields during the past decade, which was inevitably reflected in the SiC courses. An interesting feature of the German scene, perhaps explicable in terms of the Whorfian hypothesis, and at any rate reflected in the title of the school, is the loan translation "Computerlinguistik" for "computational linguistics." The more abstract, theoretical sense of "computational" tends to play second fiddle; "computability," as a central notion, is "Berechenbarkeit ," though no-one would (I hope) dream of referring to "Berechnungslinguistik." However, the term tends to