ABSTRACT

The disciplines of linguistics and computer science hold in common the distinction of having to reason, at almost every step, on both symbols and the meaning of these symbols. Thus, from the first, computer science has had to face language problems, either within itself in the establishment of codes that allow communication with the machine, or in its translations into computer language or the classification of data. There have been numerous applications of computing theory to linguistics. Everyone knows the unfortunate fate of automatic translation, in which so much research and talent was sunk without producing any real results, as the Pierce commission showed in its remarkable autopsy report. Besides the problems of copyright—where the advent of computers has enabled one to use in full statistical methods inconceivable without that tool—quantitative linguistics does not seem to have produced new or unexpected results.