Thanks to everybody who responded to the question:
1 - what is language engineering (LE), and,
2 - whether there is any relation of it to some type of social engineering,
such as language planning.
Frankly, I was a bit surprised that there was so much interest in the
subject.
The following people sent their responses (in reverse order of appearance,
sorry if I missed someone):
Ruslan Mitkob
Hamish Cunningham
Lou Bernard
Khurshid Ahmad
Doug Cooper
Tim Buckwalter
Ramesh Krishnamurthy (2x)
Chris Manning
Gabriel Pereira Lopes
Eric Atwell
Frederik Fouvry
Geoffrey Sampson (2x)
Patrick Hanks
Mark Lewellen
G.A. Gupta
Mark Stevenson
Oliver Mason
Thanks a lot!
The respondents basically agreed, or I think they did, that LE:
-- is technical in approach
-- is an art, a methodology, rather than a science
-- the result is more important than scientific foundations, theories, etc.
-- involves -- a stronger version -- modelling of human (natural,
real-world) language, or various features of language, on computer, or -- a
weaker version -- any processing of human, etc. language on computer
(including word processors, electronic dictionaries, etc.)
-- and, though most people thought that LE does NOT have anything to do with
social engineering, in fact texts show clearly that IT DOES (did?), and
precisely in the sense that somehow got attached to it in my mind, i.e. with
language planning.
-- a bit of history: it is highly likely that the spread of the term in
Europe is related to research funding lingo:
>"Language Engineering" was used officially as a label
>for a major sector of European Union research funding under the recently
>oncluded Framework IV research programme, so that Europeans naturally
>found themselves using this term -- in some contexts they _had_ to use
it --
>and it commonly occurred as an acronym, LE. << (Geoffrey Sampson)
And here is a quotation that I like, a summary as well:
>... the phrase "language engineering" has had two quite different senses.
Whether the
>use most people on this list are familiar with ("those research areas
>likely to be funded by the EU language engineering programme") is
>perhaps itself the result of language engineering in the earlier
>sense ("the process of tweaking language usage to match political or
>other social agendas") is something only history will tell us.
(Lou Bernard)
For further details I have to refer you to the relevant messages.
Here are some useful references:
There is a discussion about the meaning of the term in the first issue of
The Journal of Natural Language Engineering and, specifically, the paper by
Hamish Cunningham,
"A Definition and Short History of Language Engineering" (with numerous
references)
(pages 1--16, vol 5, 1999),
available from his Web page (http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~hamish/)
(he provided relevant definitions from the paper in his message)
Mitkov R. - Language Engineering: towards a clearer picture.
Proceedings of the International Conference on Mathematical Linguistics,
Tarragona, Spain, 2-5 May 1996
Mitkov R. - Language Engineering: new perspectives for the multilingual
society.
Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Engineering. Natural Language
Pacific Rim Symposium, 4-7 December 1995, Seoul, Korea (invited paper)
available on request from Professor Mitkov
Again: thank you!
Best regards
Tadeusz Piotrowski
***************************************************************
mailing address
Professor of Linguistics
Department of English
Opole University Zielinskiego 47/11
Oleska 48 PL-53-533 Wroclaw
Opole
POLAND
phone/fax (+48)71-3382664