Introduction To the Special Issue on the 1999 Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics Conference

The nine regular and short papers appearing in this special issue represent extended versions, completely reviewed, of those papers which appear in the Proceedings of the 1999 Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics Conference (PACLING’99). The conference was held at the University of Waterloo, Canada, in August 1999. The meeting in Waterloo was the fourth meeting under the PACLING banner. Twelve years ago this conference was conceived under the name Japan-Australia Joint Symposium on Natural Language Processing, (JAJSNLP), the first meeting of which was held in Melbourne in 1987. The first three meetings of the retitled PACLING, a name designed to express the wider membership, took place in Vancouver, Canada, in 1993, in Brisbane, Australia, in 1995, and in Ohme, Tokyo, Japan, in 1997. The Waterloo meeting closely followed the PACLING tradition. PACLING’99 was a low-profile, high-quality, workshop-oriented conference that promoted friendly scientific relations among Pacific Rim countries, with emphasis on interdisciplinary scientific exchange demonstrating openness toward good research falling outside current dominant “schools of thought” and on technological transfer within the Pacific region. The conference represents a unique forum for scientific and technological exchange, being smaller than ACL, COLING, or Applied NLP and also more regional, with extensive representation from the Pacific. The invited speakers, Bob Carpenter, Fred Popowich, and Naoyuki Okada, provided plenary sessions that served to stimulate, entice, and enthrall the audience. Research in computational linguistics is broad. Computational linguistics amalgamates research between linguistics and computer science primarily, although other disciplines play an important role as well, e.g., cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, engineering, mathematics, etc. Computational linguists study the computational aspects of language. Computational linguistics research encompasses computational models of human cognition, both applied and theoretical. The role of applied computational linguistics is to create software for improved human-machine interactions. Thus natural language interfaces enable users to communicate with the computer in human language. Applications range from database queries, information retrieval and answer extraction from texts, and so on. The applied component also focuses on software that improves human-human communications, e.g., machine translation or machine-aided translations systems. Computational linguistics software has not achieved human capabilities, Nonetheless, the growing need such software will determine the future extent to which applied computational linguistics will be developed.