In Newsletter 21 of April 1993 Douglas Clarke suggested that there was a need for some commonly required NLP programs which should be freely available to avoid programmers continually re-inventing the proverbial wheel, and that a sub-group should be set up to see what we could do about it.
 
Some meetings of people interested in supporting this proposal were held and it was decided that a comprehensive list of MNLP functions should be established first before trying to write NLP applications such as morphological analysis, multilingual word-processing, CALL programs, etc.
 
More detailed proposals were prepared and circulated to those members who had expressed an interest in supporting a software project in one of our questionnaires. However, no significant interest has been shown since in either the proposal or the project.
 
Finally, in the last Review (April 1995) I summarized the position and made it clear that we would consider proposals from sub-group members, or indeed, from anyone else.
 
No proposals or enquiries have been received since then. It is true that this period has been over the summer but I think that unless we hear of some positive interest in the next few months we will have regretfully to admit defeat and draw this project to a close.
 
Therefore, if there is anyone still interested in supporting this project please let us know as soon as possible.
 
David Wigg
 
28 September 1995