THE ORGANIZATION AND CONDUCT OF THE WORKSHOP
Donald E. Walker
SRI International
The Goal
The goal of the FID/LD Workshop on Linguistics and Information Science was tocontribute to the development of a comprehensive plan that can be used to guide research
activities for more effective use of linguistics in information science. To appreciate ourprogress toward that goal during the.three days at Biskops-Arno in May of 1976, it isnecessary to consider in some detail the stimulus that prompted the establishment of theWorkshop, the composition of the group that participated, the common information weshared in the form of the materials distributed in advance to the participants, and thesimilarities and differences in our perceptions of the needs for linguistics in information
science and of the resources that are available to work with. This chapter is organized sothat these items of background data are presented first, followed by a description of the
conduct of the Workshop itself.
The Starting Point
The point of departure for the Workshop was the survey of Linguistics and Information
Science prepared by Karen Sparck Jones and Martin Kay (1973). It provided a baseline forconsidering the relationship between those two disciplines -- and related areas of inquiry, asof 1970. Thus, distributing the book to the participants in advance assured a common
frame of reference both for the people who prepared perspective papers and for theWorkshop participants themselves during our discussions. Consequently, a brief review of
its objectives, its contents, and its conclusions seems in order.
Sparck Jones and Kay interpret information science as concerned broadly with "the storage,
retrieval, and transmission of information of any kind" (p.2), but identify their interest
more narrowly with information retrieval. Specifically, they deal with "the problems thatarise in characterizing the content of documents and information requests in such a way thatthe characterizations can be used in an automatic process which can assess the relevance ofthe document to the request" (p.2). Key elements in this focus are the emphases on thecontent of documents and of information requests, on the relevance of a document to aparticular request, and on the automatic nature of the procedure that could perform thecoordination of document and request.
Linguistics for Sparck Jones and Kay is "the science that attempts to explain how language
works" (p.3). Of particular concern, in relation to information science, are the ways inwhich linguistics can be expected to contribute to the naturalness of communication with adocumentation system; to the reduction of ambiguity; to the precision of the description of7

Donald l£. Walker
a document, of the request f o r it, and, consequently, of the correspondence between these
two elements; to the establishment of an adequate semantic structure; and to the separationof the language to communicate with the system f r o m the data stored in it.
The thorough review of the literature in the body of the book demonstrates the minimal
realization of these expectations by 1970. Following discussions of current information
retrieval systems and relevant developments within linguistics at that time, the authors
present a careful analysis of the way that language figures in documentation. They thenshow how work in syntax and semantics has been applied in information retrieval and where
it might also be applied. Sparck Jones and Kay admit to being puzzled somewhat by the
failure of systematic experiments to demonstrate that linguistic techniques have any realvalue in the contexts to which they have been applied.
In the final chapter of Linguistics and Information
Science, Sparck Jones and Kay review
their findings to determine why there has been such d i f f i c u l t y in applying linguistic
techniques to retrieval objectives. Several points were made in their introduction that
anticipated these negative conclusions about the contributions linguistics had made to
information science.
It certainly is the case that information scientists usually areconcerned with large collections of document texts, while few linguists have dealt with units
larger than sentences.
Furthermore, information scientists wishing to demonstrate theeffectiveness of their procedures deal with precision-recall ratios, while linguists trying toaccount for linguistic data try to determine what kinds of constraints are involved in the
production of an utterance. Computational linguists, who use computers in the analysis oflinguistic problems, could be expected to provide tools for information science. However,
the most relevant work they have done is in the area o f fact retrieval and question
answering systems.
Rather than responding to a request with a document or set of
documents, the goal of such systems is to provide a particular fact or a precise answer.
Since the specific items required are unlikely to be stored in the data base in precisely thef o r m requested, inferences often have to be made. In view of the relative immaturity ofwork on computer-based theorem proving and deduction, much remains to be done f o rwork on these problems to be useful.
On the basis of their analysis, the easiest course for Sparck Jones and Kay would have been
simply to accept the conclusion that general linguistic theories are not required f o r
document retrieval. However, they suggest that it would be more productive to recognize
both that linguistic theories are far f r o m adequate and that document retrieval systems are
not well understood. Accordingly, the course they promote is to f i n d out more about bothareas.
This same objective guided the F I D / L D Workshop in its deliberations.
The Group
The participants in the Workshop were selected to reflect the variety of backgrounds,
interests, and responsibilities relevant to research on linguistics in information science.
Thus, we invited people f r o m theoretical, computational, and quantitative linguistics, f r o m
i n f o r m a t i o n science, library science, and documentation, f r o m terminology and translation,and f r o m computer science and artificial intelligence. O f course, no discipline is one
dimensional, so this listing does not adequately portray the diversity of interests that wererepresented. In addition, the selection was influenced by the international nature of theorganizing body. Not only are there F I D / L D Committee members currently representing
eleven countries (nine of them were present at the Workshop), but research in linguistics
and information science and applications of linguistics to information science take place inmany countries throughout the world.
Competence is distributed without respect fornational boundaries, and the potential utility of results in these areas of endeavor isrecognized throughout the more industrialized nations of the world.

8

The Organization and Conduct of the Workshop
There were thirty participants at the Workshop, from thirteen countries: Belgium, Denmark,France, the German Federal Republic, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands,
Norwa>, Sweden, the United Kingdom, i\n^\ the tinned Slates.
These differences innationality certainly provided a leavening to our deliberations, but their effects wereminimal in comparison with the effects of differences in discipline and, perhaps mostimportant, of the variations in the characteristics of the professional activities people were
engaged i n .
It is not possible to provide a matrix that will identify the participants uniquely in relation
to their professional activities. Rather, by identifying some o f the dimensions along which
their responsibilities contrasted, I hope to indicate the richness and complexity of the group.
The variety of disciplines has been identified already: within them mere were differences
between theoreticians and practitioners. In relation to design, the contrast would be between
formal elegance and practical efficiency.
A pair of relevant system-oriented terms istechnology-driven versus demand-driven; these terms contrast orientations motivated by the
emerging technology with those responding to requirements expressed by the user.
The nature and sizes of the data bases with which people dealt differed. Some participants
were concerned with large document collections, some with experimental document systems,
some with narrowly defined microworlds not even in documentary f o r m , some with databases they generated as required to provide examples and counterexamples relevant f o r
specific theoretical issues. These differences reflected preoccupations variously with theglobal requirements of a comprehensive national library, w i t h access to special document
collections, with the selection of a set of documents that could be expected to containcertain classes of relevant i n f o r m a t i o n , and with actually identifying specific facts thatmight answer particular questions or clarify a particular issue.
Finally, the f o r m of the procedures people dealt with were based, at one extreme, on
cognitive simulations that modeled fundamental human capabilities and, at another, on
engineering solutions concerned exclusively with effective performance. It is clear that not
all of the possible combinations of these variables could have been represented in the group,
but, as w i l l be clear f r o m the obstacles toward the goal of a r r i v i n g at a consensus, enough of
the alternatives were present to ensure diversity!
Perspective

Papers

The range of subject matter to be spanned by the Workshop coupled with the differences
already noted among the participants made it essential to establish in advance some commonbase f r o m which the issues could be discussed. Consequently, before the meeting we sentout a variety of materials for background reading. Of course, the book Linguistics
andInformation
Science constituted a basic reference both for a review of the literature and fora presentation of the issues. Two chapters on automated language processing prepared f o r
the Annual Review of Information
Science and Technology (Walker, 1973; Damerau, 1976)
covered some of the more recent literature.
To sharpen the focus on issues, we asked some of the prospective participants to reflect on
the Sparck Jones and Kay book f r o m the vantage point of the disciplines we had consideredin the organization of the Workshop. The results were papers on linguistics, i n f o r m a t i o nscience, library science, quantitative linguistics, computational linguistics, and complex
semantic i n f o r m a t i o n processing. These perspective papers also were mailed in advance tothose who had been invited and are printed, with some editorial revisions, in this volume.*•A short slatement on terminology and translation was presented at the Workshop; it also is included in this
book.

9

Donald E. Walker
Because of the key role they played in the Workshop deliberations, it will be useful tosummarize them briefly here. They will be considered in the order in which they arepresented in subsequent chapters.
Information Science, by F.W. Lancaster. In his perspective paper on information science,
Lancaster emphasizes document analysis, description and retrieval. To provide context, he
first examines the activities of information transfer, elaborating on the cycle from creatorsof information through the publication and distribution process to assimilation by the usercom mini il> (either directly or indirectly through libraries and information centers) and backto the creators again. Assimilation by the user community may be direct or indirect throughlibraries and information centers. It is in the information retrieval systems embodied inthese mediating agencies that Lancaster explores the relation between linguistics andinformation science.
"Information retrieval systems are concerned with the acquisition and storage of materials,
their organization and control, and their dissemination/presentation to particular user
communities." However, the area of organization and control is most relevant for ourconcerns here, since it establishes the bases for storing documents and for allowing them tobe recovered. Lancaster focuses on subject access in his analysis, stressing the parallels
between the conceptual analysis and translation phases both of the indexing process and of
the search request. The performance of an information retrieval system depends on thequality of the request, the accuracy of its translation into a search strategy, and theeffectiveness of the matching process which is limited by the adequacy, accuracy, andexhaustiveness of the initial indexing.
Within information retrieval, Lancaster singles out three major areas in which theapplication of linguistic techniques, used computationally, can be beneficial. In indexing,
they can be considered in relation to extracting words from text, selecting terms from acontrolled vocabulary, and using a part of the text itself. In vocabulary control, they can beused to insure consistent representation of subject matter and to bring together terms thatare semantically related. In searching, they can contribute to the approximation in an
automatic system of the formal structured strategies provided by conventional systems; inaddition, they can be use in searching natural language data bases.
In his last section, Lancaster projects the increase in machine readable data bases as leading
within 25 years to paperless scientific and technical communication. Online terminals will
be used in creating, transmitting, and disseminating documents, in search and retrieval
operations, and, broadly, in interpersonal communication. Based on these capabilities,
linguistic techniques will assume a critical importance for information systems of the future.
Lancaster concludes that linguists and information scientists must collaborate to solve thedesign and implementation problems these systems entail.
Library Science, by Derek Austin. Austin's perspective from the vantage of library scienceemphasizes terminological considerations as they affect a large, multi-media, pandisciplinary library. He begins more generally by examining the factors that bear on theselection of an indexing system. Libraries vary significantly in size from small personalcollections to national archives. The types of media they contain may include printed texts,
maps, prints, photographs, and audio-visual materials of an increasing variety, produced byboth conventional and nonconventional means. The contents included range from a single,
highly specific subject field to comprehensive all-inclusive coverage.

10

The Organization and Conduct of the Workshop
The large, multi-media, pan-disciplinary library faces special problems in trying to provide
a unified data base accessible by u n i f o r m procedures and available to the public in aninteractive mode. Austin notes that the number of acquisitions each year is extremely large
and that few come with abstracts that might allow current or prospective linguistic
procedures to be used. In addition, the non-textual materials are in principle not accessible
to such processing. If there is to be a common system for textual and nontextual materials,
it will be necessary to have human indexers, Austin argues. However, it is not sufficient towork with term cooccurrence without establishing syntactic relations among them to ensure
adequate discrimination.
In response to these problems, Austin has created a system called PRECIS, which hedescribes in his paper. He has built on certain aspects of linguistic structure in that "(1) theorder of terms in input strings, and in the entries generated by a range of transformationalalgorithms out of these strings, is based by intent upon a subset of the declarative word
strings occurring in natural language; (2) the system also employs a number of [natural
language] devices, such as machine-produced prepositional phrases, to resolve latentambiguities in the entries." In the input string, the indexer introduces the component termsof an entry together with codes that specify relations among them. The system produces af u l l range o f entries covering all the headings under which the item should be indexed,
including See and See Also references.
Although PRECIS makes use of linguistic structures only in a limited way, it certainly
would be possible to increase its sophistication by the use of additional techniques. PRECIS
has been used in experiments with materials in languages other than English with definite
success. It also looks promising for use as a translingual
switching system to provide for
automatic conversion of input strings in one language into entries in another language.
Quantitative
Linguistics,
by Wolf Moskovich.
Moskovich's perspective paper contains adetailed examination of quantitative linguistics in relation to i n f o r m a t i o n science.
Quantitative linguistics provides a description of a linguistic system based on estimates o f
the relative frequencies of the particular phenomena under investigation. Noting that there
has been some controversy about where it fits within linguistics, he identifies it as the partof mathematical linguistics that attempts to determine the laws underlying the statisticalorganization of texts and to reveal structural features o f language by analyzing the behaviorof the linguistic units in texts. Although the same procedures may be used in i n f o r m a t i o nscience for document analysis, storage, and retrieval, the primary goal there is to build
workable systems.
Moskovich explicates the similarities and differences in the use ofstatistical techniques as applied to text analysis in each area in order to establish thecontributions quantitative linguistics already has made to i n f o r m a t i o n science and to
determine what its future contributions might be.
The major point of intersection of quantitative linguistics and i n f o r m a t i o n science is in thedescription of language phenomena, as opposed to the use of quantitative arguments toresolve qualitative issues or to explain linguistic phenomena. Relevant models are word
frequency distributions, measures of sentence length, syntactic complexity, semantic
u n i f o r m i t y , and semantic distance; thus, frequency dictionaries and concordances are items
relevant f o r both areas.
Moskovich notes that distributive-statistical techniques wereapplied independently to discover semantic fields in language and to identify similarities
among texts for retrieval. Subsequent studies o f the associative links among words in
different text intervals have had implications both for linguistics and i n f o r m a t i o n retrieval,

11

Donald E. Walker
Contributions to information science by quantitative linguistics can be expected to resultf r o m its increased attention to characterizing subsets of natural language and to the statistics
ol v.ord combinations rather than isolated words. Specifically, statistical analysis of thesubsets can provide data relevant to scientific and technological sublanguages; techniques
f o r studying word combinations can be used to deal with associative term structures. Moregenerally, quantitative linguistics can help information science in three domains: thecreation of a lexicographic basis for systems; automatic indexing, abstracting, and documentcomparison; and the quantitative laws of text organization. Moskovich singles out researchin distributive-statistical techniques f o r major emphasis, pointing out the utility of
associative nets of words for i n f o r m a t i o n retrieval, the use of machine-constructed
thesauruses in interactive searching, and the possibility of complex algorithms for automatic
text analysis (morphological, syntactic, and semantic). However, he points out that theultimate value of quantitative linguistics rests on the significance of the linguistic units thatare processed.
Computational
Linguistics,
by Naomi Sager.
Sager begins her perspective paper oncomputational linguistics by noting that its application to information processing andretrieval has been limited by the d i f f i c u l t y of the problem, the absence of appropriate
support software, the lack of detailed grammatical descriptions, and too frequent attempts todevelop short-cut solutions. In the area of parsing in particular, that is, in determining thesyntactic structure of a sentence, early work resulted in multiple and often spurious analyses
due to difficulties in identifying the appropriate attachments f o r prepositional phrases andother modifiers and the complex problems associated with conjunction, comparison, andellipsis, among other factors. Grammatical rules do not contain selectional restrictions that
constrain which combinations of words may actually occur in a syntactically well-formed
construction. Since these restrictions are specific to a particular subject area, to develop
procedures that can be used on arbitrary text, it is necessary to be able to distinguish theappropriate constituents but defer building the multiple structures they can f o r m . Anothermechanism is the introduction of transformations that operate on the surface parses to
produce an underlying representation of the meaning or deep structure of the sentence. In
this way, it is possible to reduce the number of alternative grammatical forms containing thesame information.
Sager describes how these developments are being used in her own work to provide more
effective computational linguistic analyses. She believes that the choice of an underlying
representation for semantic content at this stage in computational linguistics should bedetermined primarily by the applicational context.
Her transformational decomposition
provides a hierarchy of function-argument predications.
She has used distributional
linguistic techniques to derive patterns of word-class cooccurrence from transformationallyanalyzed texts that reveal the subject matter for a scientific subfield.
It is possible to apply computational linguistics in a number of areas. Sager's studies haveshown that word lists for thesauruses can be generated from function-argument predications
to provide semantically sharp and i n f o r m a t i o n a l l y relevant subclasses. Similarly, structured
index terms for the sentences of a text can be derived from triples consisting of an operator
and its noun arguments that were obtained f r o m transformational decomposition. Further
developments should allow deriving more comprehensive patterns that apply to larger
amounts of text. In restricted natural language data bases, it also seems possible to format
text elements into structures suitable f o r question answering and statistical analysis. Forinteractive retrieval systems, computational linguistic techniques would enable the user todirect the search himself but could also be used to increase precision by checking syntactic
relations and eliminating false coordinations. In conclusion, Sager notes that although theprocessing times f o r sentences still are large, most research groups are using laboratory

12

The Organization and Conduct of the Workshop
rather than production models. When the computational linguistic capabilities f o r massprocessing of texts are developed, the computer technology should be available to support
them.
Linguistics,
by Pcir Sgall.
In his perspective paper on linguistics, Sgall considers therelevance of linguistic techniques for fact retrieval rather than f o r automatic indexing or
document retrieval.
He begins with a detailed analysis of Winograd's language
understanding system, identifying the new factors introduced there as explicitly involving
the relations between linguistic competence and performance, pragmatics, and reference.
Sgall believes that Winograd's work has contributed to a new understanding of the structureof language and the tasks of linguistics in two major ways. First, it provides the basis for arigorous test of linguistic theories. Second, the imperative form for representing knowledge
and semantics serves as a model for incorporating those concepts into linguistics.
Previous work in linguistics concentrated on features characteristic of specific languages
rather than on those common to them. New developments in linguistic theory, particularlyin the areas of performance, pragmatics, and reference, are reflecting a recognition of theimportance of language use. with semantic, psychological, and sociological, implications.
Studies of the structure of texts are providing a basis for classifying them and for describing
their coherence in a way useful for the analysis of dialogs, questions and answers, and otherdiscourse elements. In addition, linguists are beginning to acknowledge the relevance o fcomputing.
However, the major development in linguistics for potential application to i n f o r m a t i o nscience Sgall finds in the area of linguistic semantics. After considering the work of thetransformationalists and the Montague approach in this area, he argues for the direction
being followed by the stratificationalists and functionalists. Their work with diagnostic
contexts has provided testable criteria and made it possible to establish the units required on
different levels of language structure. They f i n d it desirable to distinguish between the
linguistic sense or intensional structure of sentences and the logical or cognitive structuresthat specify their truth value. This distinction would allow handling strict synonymy in the
narrow linguistic sense and yet make it possible to identify as equivalent sentences whose
cognitive content for a given state of affairs is the same.
Sgall also stresses the significance of topic, focus, and communicative dynamism as they
relate to given and new knowledge in the conversational context. The structure of sentencesmust be represented so that they reflect the basic conditions of communication. As a result,an adequate characterization of language should include f o r m , function, and the sharedknowledge required for understanding. He correlates these notions to the organization andstructure of human memory.
Sgall concludes that there are significant developments in linguistics that can be used in fact
retrieval, although he acknowledges the problem of extrapolating f r o m the restricted domainof a given experiment to a universe of realistic situations. Constraints can be applied on theusers of a system to accommodate to its level of linguistic sophistication, and preediling oftexts may be required initially, but the long range results should be natural language
programming.
Complex Semantic Information
Processing, by Teun A. van Dijk.
Van Dijk's perspective
paper on complex semantic i n f o r m a t i o n processing considers the structure and processing o f
discourse as reflected in recent work on text grammars in linguistics; on the analysis o fnarratives, conversations, and the like in poetics and anthropology; on the function of13

Donald L. Walker
language in communication and social interaction in sociology, socio-linguistics, andpragmatics; and on the representation of knowledge structures in cognitive psychology andartificial intelligence. He relates procedures for the assessment of the semantic content oftexts to the structure and formation of text abstracts.
In his analysis, van Dijk distinguishes discourse, as an empirical, cognitive, and social verbal
unit that is physically manifested in verbal utterances, from text, which is an abstract
theoretical construct that makes explicit the structure of discourse. Documents containdiscourses, but understanding takes place only in relation to the text structure'assigned to a
discourse. The semantics of both meaning and reference are characterized at two levels:
micro-structures relate to the structure of constituent propositions and their linear
sequences; macro-structures provide a perspective on the structure as a whole. Macro-rules
define the mapping between these levels, establishing coherence and connectedness relations;van Dijk considers rules for deletion, generalization, selection, and construction or
integration in detail. A macro-structure constitutes a summary of a document, whentranslated into some conventionally interpretable language, since it defines what issemantically important for a discourse. These summaries themselves may be organized inhigher-order macro-structures that define subject domains.
To illustrate his approach, van Dijk provides a detailed analysis of a particular document
describing an experiment in social psychology.
He presents the micro-propositions
underlying the article, the macro-rules that apply to them, the resulting sequence of macropropositions, two alternative summaries that can be derived from the macro-propositions,and a superstructure for the paper as a whole that places it in the context of similar reportsof psychological experiments.
A useful information system along the lines described by van Dijk would require a fullmorpho-syntax, a meaning and reference semantics, a system of conventional knowledge
about the actual world and about relevant possible worlds, and various inference rules todefine derivational relations among propositions. Since none of these components is readyyet, any current system can only be partial and theoretical, handling fragmentary parts of
discourse, world knowledge, and concepts.
Terminology and Translation, by J. Goetschalckx.
Goetschalckx' perspective paper
addresses the requirements faced by multilingual documentation systems like the one being
established for the European Communities in Luxembourg. Distinguishing two types ofsuch systems, those based on keywords or descriptors and those accessing titles or abstracts,
he stresses the need for a terminological control that balances coherence with usage. For thelatter system, phrases are essential for retrieval accuracy. However, terms in a phrases are
not always in standard form, particularly for inflecting languages, so truncation is required.
Procedures are being developed both for automatic truncation and for morphologicalreduction. The translation requirement complicates the development of an effective system,
and when the user needs more than descriptor equivalence, machine translation may berequired.
The Challenge Paper
The perspective papers addressed the issues of linguistics and information science from the avariety of disciplines. To complement their breadth and to help focus the discussions at theWorkshop, one other paper was solicited, a challenge paper. Hans Karlgren provided it
under the title "Homeosemy--On the Linguistics of Information Retrieval." He organizedhis material as a series of disputable propositions, beginning with the premise that

14

The Organization and Conduct of the Workshop"Linguistics is necessary for the design of future computer-based i n f o r m a t i o n retrieval
systems." Noting that linguistics is not restricted to natural language processing, he stresses
that selectivity of search is the key problem for mechanical retrieval systems. To provide
this capability. Karlgren argues that research and experimentation should focus on theapplication o f complex procedures to small files - - to the exclusion of other activities. In
particular, he argues against teaching users to accommodate to their systems, but rather to be
guided by their difficulties in designing more effective procedures. Retrieving relevant
passages f r o m documents can be as d i f f i c u l t for small files as f o r large.
In characterizing the retrieval
question answering systems:
order i:order i i :order i i i :problem, Karlgren

distinguishes among

three kindsofsystems w i t h a f i n i t e set of questions
systems with a f i n i t e set of answers
systems with an i n f i n i t e set of answers

These systems differ in the explicitness with which questions and answers and their relations
can be specified in advance. Order i systems, which might provide inventory control ortravel planning, could in principle be precomputed in the sense that both questions andanswers are limited and their relations fixed. In order ii systems, like those for document
retrieval, any answer is a subset of the items stored. In order i i i systems, like those f o r fact
retrieval, answers can be derived f r o m stored information on the basis of an analysis of thequery. Karlgren restricted his consideration to order ii systems as most appropriate for the
purposes of the Workshop.
In this context, he argued that the key problem is what
constitutes a good match between question/requests by the user and answer/offers f r o m thesystem.
Resolving this problem w i l l require looking more closely at the contents ofdescriptions in their relation to the objects to be retrieved on the one hand and to therequests on the other.
Karlgren distinguishes non-linguistic and linguistic approaches to the solution of thematching problem. The non-linguistic approach requires translating request and offer into acommon language and matching according to their identity, with Boolean logic perhaps
introduced for more complex computations. While linguistic components may be used insuch systems, the matching process itself is not viewed as linguistic. Rather, that process
entails reducing variation between request and offer through successive approximations,inevitably with an overall loss of precision. In contrast, a linguistic approach accepts as apremise that exact representation is impossible, but continues by a f f i r m i n g that exact
representation is unnecessary and insufficient. Karlgren introduces and elaborates on theconcept o f homeosemy or similarity of meaning and argues for a metric defining
similarities of expressions and specifying the distance or association between them.
Karlgren concludes by stating that linguistics should dissuade documentalists from trying tocreate ideal retrieval languages, to attack retrieval through language reduction, and tostabilize retrieval languages rather than make them more flexible. Linguistics can provide
parsers and other tools, qualitative and quantitative procedures for synonymy andassociation, and methods f o r grammatical filtering. In response, linguists should be enjoinedby documentalists to study more carefully inexact expressions, shifts of meaning, questionanswering, and semantic topology. The results in both directions could be significant andproductive.

15

Donald E. Walker
The Conduct oftheWorkshopIn the initial planning discussions, the following agenda for the three-day Workshop was
proposed: On the first day, the group would establish "where we are", the current state ofaffairs in linguistics and information science. On the second day, th« group would consider"where we should go", identifying a target state of affairs that would constitute a desirable
goal. The third day, then, would be devoted to "how we can get there", the researchnecessary to bridge the gap. However, it was not possible to constrain the participants tothis agenda. Our deliberations can be differentiated into three periods that do correspondroughly
to the original intent, but the times consumed were different, and our
accomplishments did not provide as neat a resolution as we had envisioned. The f o l l o w i n gsummary, although it does not do justice to the richness of the interactions or the subtletiesof the disagreements, does convey the substance of what transpired.
The f i r s t period did establish a characterization of the state o f the art in the relevant areasthat does constitute a set of recognizable trends useful in clarifying "where we are". In
library science, collections are getting larger and more varied.
In terminology andtranslation, science and technology are becoming internationalized, with demands for sharedaccessibility of files in a variety of languages from different countries. The automation ofscientific and technical information in information science is increasing, with more
documents in digital f o r m and a variety of o n - l i n e interactive retrieval systems available foraccessing them. Computational linguistics is maturing in the capabilities of systems f o r
syntactic analysis (parsing); applications to text analysis are now beginning to be made; andexperimental language understanding systems have been built that contain small but
interesting
semantic microworlds.
Linguists are now addressing with enthusiasm the
problems of language in use, performance, as well as competence, is a legitimate area of
inquiry; as a result, a more comprehensive view of language is emerging.
Finally, incomputer science and artificial intelligence, new developments are occurring over a range ofdiverseareas: o n - l i n e ,interactive
personalcomputers;
network
linkageswithteleconferencing; and cognitive modeling. Because these areas are so dynamic themselves, it
is not possible to establish a precisely specified base line f r o m which work on linguistics
and i n f o r m a t i o n science can proceed. The focus of the Workshop is part of a much larger
set of influences and cannot be considered apart f r o m them.
The second period of discussions, rather than specifying directly "where we should go",consisted of attempts to identify the variety of "we's" among the participants.
The
differences among them in background and orientation (described earlier in this chapter inthe section on "The Group") were used deliberately to enrich the interactions, but they had
more complex effects on the outcome of the Workshop. It is useful to characterize themajor types of protagonists and the goals they reflected here, even at the risk of somecaricature, to clarify these effects. The pan-disciplinary
multi-media
librarianconcerned
with developing an effective system to allow discrimination among masses oT diverse
materials needed richer linguistic techniques for analyzing noun phrases. The
multi-lingual
document specialist coping with specialized archives in various languages needed spelling
rules, transliteration schemes, morphological analysis procedures, and techniques f o r
constructing and analyzing phrase patterns.
The information
scienceexperimentalist
working with well-specified corpuses of documents and complex evaluation procedures
wanted techniques that had a demonstrable effect on system performance. The
quantitative
linguist with sophisticated mathematical models and processes needed a more precise
specification of relevant linguistic units.
The computational
linguist exploring newly
developed systems in a variety of application areas wanted more than anything else the timeand resources that would allow determining their potential. The artificial
intelligence typecaught up in o n - l i n e computer and communication technology and beginning to model a

16

The Organization and Conduct of the Workshop
variety of human capabilities ~ cognitive and linguistic - - asked only f o r more technology
to allow freedom to explore further. The theoretical linguist in his new appreciation forthe breadth and scope of language and its use required time to work out the wealth of new
ideas he saw emerging f r o m his field.
The Workshop participants exhibited one or another of these identities or blended them insubtle wa>s. Consequently, it was d i f f i c u l t to involve the group as whole in a coherent
discussion; the premises kept changing. People were asked to identify the positions withrespect to which they made specific observations, criticisms, and recommendations, so thebases for differences would become more explicit and their effects could be used moreconstructi\ely.
However, the size of the group and the extremity of the divergences inpoints of view limited the utility of parliamentary strategies of this kind.
This special group dynamic had an impact on the determination of "how we can get there"
in two ways: First, rather than delineate a single coherent program of research for linguistics
and information science, we identified a multiplicity of approaches that responded to thedifferent interests. Second, the efforts to clarify the nature and source of our disagreements
became a major preoccupation. As a result, it would be more appropriate to characterize ourconclusions as addressing, somewhat moire weakly, the issue "what will help". What wasmost impressive was the intensity and heat of our discussions. It is clear that we hadbrought together the right people to create sparks. However, it also is proper to note that
we had perhaps too many sparks and not enough tinder!
Some useful observations can be extracted f r o m our Workshop experience.
Since theprotagonists identified above all have a proper place in further discussions, a framework forshared understanding must be developed.
We need to identify for each approach the
responsibilities entailed - - practical and theoretical, explicit and i m p l i c i t - - that must be
satisfied, the underlying technological resources, the scientific concepts on whichconstructive developments can be built, and the sociological structure of the institutions
w i t h i n which people work. In other words, we need a more precise map of the territory weare exploring.
Increases in contact and communication among people involved in various ways withlinguistics and information science are essential. More workshops are in order, but the next
ones should have fewer participants, be less heterogeneous, and meet for longer periods. We
must get to know each other better in situations that allow us *ime to arrive at a sharedunderstanding first, but that also let us stay together long enough to build toward somemutually relevant cooperative activities. For credibility among the practitioners, we must
address some near-term goals that have demonstrable effects. For credibility among thetheoreticians, we must establish a set of concepts that are defensible and productive.
During the Workshop, we discussed a number of proposals for research. One coordinatedlist of proposals presented a series of projects that applied increasingly sophisticatedlinguistic techniques to document storage and retrieval. Another more comprehensive list
attacked problems in virtually every area of concern that had been reflected in previous
discussions. However, it was not possible to discuss any of these proposals at sufficient
length to be able to characterize them as the consensus of the participants. Nor were any ofthem specified in enough detail to provide an adequate basis for their evaluation.
Consequently, these lists would not be appropriate to icproduce here. Some of the ideas
were anticipated in the perspective and challenge papers; readers who are interested in
immediate inspiration are advised to read those documents carefully f r o m that standpoint.
A more comprehensive evaluation of the proposals and the preparation of specific project
outlines is accepted as the responsibility o\' the F I D Committee on Linguistics in

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Donald E. Walker
Documentation. We will provide a next step toward the development of a comprehensive
plan to guide research activities f o r more effective use of linguistics in information science.
It is clear that the framework for shared communication mentioned above is essential andthat continuations of the personal interactions begun in this Workshop will figure
significantly in any future accomplishments.
Linguistics and Information

Science: After

Five Years

Karen Sparck Jones and Martin Kay provided the point of departure for the Workshop in
their survey Linguistics and Information
Science. Both of them joined in our deliberations
as participants, contributing significantly to our discussions.
In addition, after theWorkshop was over, they got together and wrote a postscript to review the major
developments since the completion of the manuscript for their book in 1971. This paper,
which focuses specifically on linguistics and information retrieval, provides a f i t t i n g
concluding chapter for this book.
W i t h i n theoretical linguistics, the authors note that semantic problems associated withquantifiers and related logical issues have led some transformational grammarians to lookf o r abstract deep structures. A n interest in functional ism. associated with the notion of
speech acts, has led to an interest in presuppositions, performatives, and other pragmatic
phenomena associated with language use. As a result, the distinction between the notions ofcompetence and performance seems to be breaking down, and linguists are no longer able tol i m i t themselves to consideration of isolated sentences. Within computational linguistics,
the computational metaphor has become increasingly compelling in guiding the developmentof models f o r the production and understanding of utterances. Although current systems
are limited to micro-worlds, they demonstrate significant progress of potential relevance toinformation retrieval.
In information retrieval, the major development has been the growth of o n - l i n e searchsystems for very large data bases. While the effectiveness of these systems has increased
substantially, they reflect, if anything, less use of linguistic capabilities.
Rather,computational power provides f l e x i b i l i t y by allowing complicated specifications to be made.
In addition, statistical techniques and automatic weighting schemes are being used withincreasing success. However, there are still too few relevant experiments to enable any ofthese procedures to be evaluated.
Sparck Jones and Kay are not discouraged by their conclusion that the connection between
linguistics and information retrieval is not greater now than it was when their book was
written. They account f o r this fact in relation to the sharp distinction in scale between theconcerns of the two disciplines. However, they note that linguists are becoming interested inlarger units of discourse and they believe that retrieval systems soon will have to retrieve
information units smaller than documents. Consequently, they expect greater collaborationin the future, a conclusion clearly echoed by the Workshop deliberations - - although thesteps toward that goal still remain to be defined in research terms.

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