London, 16–18 October 1995

When receiving notice of this Convention one at first wondered whether it was a Convention on Second Language Engineering or the Second Convention on Language Engineering. Perhaps the ambiguity was intended by the organisers as a test of the perception of language engineers and others gathering for the Convention!
 
The Convention, organized by the D.T.I. and the European Commission, included a programme of presented papers and an exhibition of some of the latest language engineering systems.
 
The papers presented covered a wide range of themes, including dialogue analysis, speech recognition, CALL, aids for the disabled, and standards. A significant number of papers dealt specifically with Machine Translation (MT); others had relevance to MT; most were undoubtedly of interest to each of the delegates there.
 
The importance of language engineering (LE) was emphasized in the address of welcome by Mr Roberts Cencioné of the European Commission. If Europe was to be truly multilingual, with no one language becoming dominant, this would put a considerable burden on language technology to provide facilities in a variety of areas including language engineering and international business.
 
'It Would be Good to Talk' was the title of the first main paper, by Professor Peter Cochrane of BT Laboratories. This paper reflected the expected spread of speech-processing systems in many aspects of everyday life, in person–with–machine communication or in person–through–machine–with–person communication. It also reflected much of the scope of the other papers presented. Such systems would involve a considerable degree of linguistic analysis which, he warned, could introduce artificialities such as pauses into dialogue. Such pauses could lead to unintended misinterpretation, as for example:
 
Wife to husband on the phone: 'Are you with another woman?'
Pause.
Husband: 'No'.
 
Applications of LE to telephony were considered in a number of other papers including one entitled 'Back to the Future ...' by Dr N. Fraser of Vocalis Ltd. He pointed out that telephone design reflects current technology rather than users' needs. LE would allow the incorporation of a 'virtual operator' into a telephone system and bring back all the advantages that users enjoyed in the early days of telephones — sans dial, sans key-pad, sans telephone directory.
 
Telephony, of course, is one context in which MT could be applied. Such a speech–to–speech translation system, developed at SRI International (Cambridge, UK), was described by Dr M. Rayner. He discussed the need for such a system to be portable, reconfigurable and customisable, but also stressed some of the difficulties, for example, the variations between even Mexican Spanish and Puerto Rican Spanish in an English–with–Spanish interpreting system. Also there was the problem of how to check that the listener had correctly recognized what the speaker had said.
 
Other papers covered topics on the future of translation services, particularly on the information highway. One such paper, entitled 'No Highway without Service Stations: TELELANG', was presented by Mr Z. Karssen of EUROLANG, France.
 
Minority languages were not overlooked and an interesting presentation, on applications of LE to Welsh, was given by Mr M. Williams of the Welsh Joint Education Committee.
 
The importance attached to standards was indicated by a whole session being devoted to this subject. This, interestingly, re-echoes the concern shown within the NLTSG about the question of standards.
 
Considerable time was also devoted to the Third Language Engineering Call for Proposals, initiated by the European Commission.
 
The exhibition included demonstrations of a number of speech recognition systems. Some were demonstrated as components of speech input word-processors. Even with pauses between words, these are clearly more satisfactory than those in which each letter of a word has to be keyed in. The days of QWERTY Keyboards may well be numbered! Other demonstrations were of continuous speech recognition systems, which could well be incorporated in many of the LE systems discussed in the Convention.
 
Conventions, like conferences, are undoubtedly far from easy to organize. Dr Richard Sharman, of IBM (UK), and his associates are to be congratulated on the excellence of the planning and organizing of this Convention.
 
[Further information about the Convention is available from the NLTSG].
 
Douglas Clarke

Some readers may be interested to know where they could start to prepare themselves for a career in Machine Translation. An examination of the UCAS Handbook for 1996 entry reveals the following Universities offering Joint Degrees in Computing and Linguistics;

University of East London

Barking Campus, Longbridge Road, Dagenham, Essex RM8 2AS
BA/BSc and BA/BSc Honours in Information Technology and Linguistics

 

The University of Edinburgh

Edinburgh EH8 9YL
MA Joint Honours in Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence

 

The University of Essex

Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ
BA Single Honours in Computational Linguistics
BSc Joint and Combined Honours in Computer Science with French, German, Russian and Spanish

 

The University of Kent at Canterbury

Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NZ,
Combined Honours Courses in Computing and Linguistics

 

Lancaster University

The University, Lancaster LA1 4YW
BSc/BA, with Honours, in Computer Science and Linguistics

 

University of Leeds

The University, Leeds LS2 9JT
BA Honours in Linguistics and Computing

 

Luton College of Higher Education

Park Square, Luton, Beds LU1 3JU
BA and BSc Honours in Computer Science and Linguistics

 

The University of Manchester Institute of Technology

Manchester M60 1QD
BSc Honours in Computational Linguistics with French, German, Japanese or Spanish

 

Queen Mary and Westfield College

(University of London), Mile End Road, London E1 4NS
BA Honours (4 yrs) in Computer Science and Linguistics with French or German

 

The University of Sheffield

Sheffield S10 2TN
BSc Honours in Computer Science with Modern Languages

 

University of Southampton

Southampton SO17 1BJ
BSc (Honours) in Computer Science and Modern Languages

 

University of Sussex

Sussex House, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9RH
BA Honours in Linguistics in Cognitive and Computing Sciences

 

University of Ulster

Coleraine, Co.Londonderry, N.Ireland BT52 1SA
BSc Honours in Computing and Linguistics

 

University of Wolverhampton

Wulfruna Street, Wolverhampton WV1 1SB
BA/BA Honours or BSc/BSc Honours in Computing with Linguistics

There were too many Universities offering joint degree courses in a computing subject with one or more foreign language to list them individually! If you are interested you can get a copy of the UCAS Handbook for 1996 entry by telephoning +44 (0) 1242 227788.
 
JDW