lf-adaptively. This
is a big challenge."

Eduard Hovy added in September 2000: "I see a continued increase in
small companies using language technology in one way or another: either
to provide search, or translation, or reports, or some other
communication function. The number of niches in which language
technology can be applied continues to surprise me: from stock reports
and updates to business-to-business communications to marketing...

With regard to research, the main breakthrough I see was led by a
colleague at ISI (I am proud to say), Kevin Knight. A team of
scientists and students last summer at Johns Hopkins University in
Maryland developed a faster and otherwise improved version of a method
originally developed (and kept proprietary) by IBM about 12 years ago.
This method allows one to create a machine translation (MT) system
automatically, as long as one gives it enough bilingual text.
Essentially the method finds all correspondences in words and word
positions across the two languages and then builds up large tables of
rules for what gets translated to what, and how it is phrased.

Although the output quality is still low -- no-one would consider this
a final product, and no-one would use the translated output as is --
the team built a (low-quality) Chinese-to-English MT system in 24
hours. That is a phenomenal feat -- this has never been done before.
(Of course, say the critics: you need something like 3 million sentence
pairs, which you can only get from the parliaments of Canada, Hong
Kong, or other bilingual countries; and of course, they say, the
quality is low. But the fact is that more bilingual and semi-equivalent
text is becoming available online every day, and the quality will keep
improving to at least the current levels of MT engines built by hand.
Of that I am certain.)

Other developments are less spectacular. There's a steady improvement
in the performance of systems that can decide whether an ambiguous word
such as "bat" means "flying mammal" or "sports tool" or "to hit"; there
is solid work on cross-language information retrieval (which you will
soon see in being able to find Chinese and French documents on the web
even though you type in English-only queries), and there is some rather
rapid development of systems that answer simple questions automatically
(rather like the popular web system AskJeeves, but this time done by
computers, not humans). These systems refer to a large collecti