ranslation, automated text summarization, text planning and generation,
and the semi-automated construction of large lexicons and terminology banks. The
Natural Language Group at ISI currently has projects in most of these areas.

Dr. Hovy is the author or editor of four books and over 100 technical articles.
He currently serves as the President of the Association of Machine Translation
in the Americas (AMTA). He is Vice President of the Association for
Computational Linguistics (ACL), and has served on the editorial boards of
Computational Linguistics and the Journal of the Society of Natural Language
Processing of Japan.

*Interview of August 27, 1998

= How do you see the growth of a multilingual Web?

In the context of information retrieval (IR) and automated text summarization
(SUM), multilingualism on the Web is another complexifying factor. People will
write their own language for several reasons -- convenience, secrecy, and local
applicability -- but that does not mean that other people are not interested in
reading what they have to say! This is especially true for companies involved in
technology watch (say, a computer company that wants to know, daily, all the
Japanese newspaper and other articles that pertain to what they make) or some
government intelligence agencies (the people who provide the most up-to-date
information for use by your government officials in making policy, etc.). One of
the main problems faced by these kinds of people is the flood of information, so
they tend to hire "weak" bilinguals who can rapidly scan incoming text and throw
out what is not relevant, giving the relevant stuff to professional translators.
Obviously, a combination of SUM and MT (machine translation) will help here;
since MT is slow, it helps if you can do SUM in the foreign language, and then
just do a quick and dirty MT on the result, allowing either a human or an
automated IR-based text classifier to decide whether to keep or reject the
article.

For these kinds of reasons, the US Government has over the past five years been
funding research in MT, SUM, and IR, and is interested in starting a new program
of research in Multilingual IR. This way you will be able to one day open
Netscape or Explorer or the like, type in your query in (say) English, and have
the engine return texts in all the languages of the world. You will have them
clustered by subarea, summarized by cluster, and the foreign summaries
translated, a