kinds of reasons, the U.S. Government has over the past five years been
funding research in MT, SUM, and IR (information retrieval), 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, all the kinds of things that you would like to have."

Eduard Hovy added in August 1999: "Over the past 12 months I have been
contacted by a surprising number of new information technology (IT)
companies and startups. Most of them plan to offer some variant of
electronic commerce (online shopping, bartering, information gathering,
etc.). Given the rather poor performance of current non-research level
natural language processing technology (when is the last time you
actually easily and accurately found a correct answer to a question to
the web, without having to spend too much time sifting through
irrelevant information?), this is a bit surprising. But I think
everyone feels that the new developments in automated text
summarization, question analysis, and so on, are going to make a
significant difference. I hope so!--but the level of performance is not
available yet.

It seems to me that we will not get a big breakthrough, but we will get
a somewhat acceptable level of performance, and then see slow but sure
incremental improvement. The reason is that it is very hard to make
your computer really 'understand' what you mean -- this requires us to
build into the computer a network of 'concepts' and their
interrelationships that (at some level) mirror those in your own mind,
at least in the subjects areas of interest. The surface (word) level is
not adequate -- when you type in 'capital of Switzerland', current
systems have no way of knowing whether you mean 'capital city' or
'financial capital'. Yet the vast majority of people would choose the
former reading, based on phrasing and on knowledge about what kinds of
things one is likely to ask the web, and in what way. Several projects
are now building, or proposing to build, such large 'concept' networks.
This is not something one can do in two years, and not something that
has a correct result. We have to develop both the network and the
techniques for building it semi-automatically and se