Since antiquity, scholars of language have created reference works such as dictionaries, thesauri, classification systems, and lists of names and places. The same need for authority exists in the Information Age because there is now a burgeoning store of electronic text that needs to be organized, indexed and classified.
Electronic text presents new challenges as well as new opportunities.
The time-honored methods of indexing and classifying text by hand are too expensive to be feasible on the scale required for organizing electronic text, so automated methods need to be developed. This same text also promises to supply the raw data required to maintain and create new generations of reference works, because here is where cultural change is being documented. Just in the past five years, electronic text, especially text retrieved from the Web, has been brimming with talk about road rage , virtual malls , Beanie Babies , school shooting rampages , digital libraries , metadata object models and health insurance portability . Given that OCLC makes repositories of text available to users, it is reasonable to wonder whether computer software that encodes some understanding of human language would make these repositories easier to create, organize, access and navigate. In 1996, the Office of Research started a research program in natural language processing to investigate this question.