2002: Another Score

Twenty years is a long time to spend in prison, but it is a short time in intellectual history. In the few years Just prior to the foundation of this Association, we had come from remarkably complex but nevertheless rather superficial analysis of text as strings of characters or, perhaps, lexlcal units to programs for parsing that operated on complex grammatical symbols but according to rather simple general principles; the programs could be independent of the language. And at the moment of foundation, we had--In the words of D. R. Swanson--run up against the stone wall of semantics. No one at the time could say whether it was the wall of a prison yard or another step in the old intellectual pyramid.