karen sparck jones received the lifetime achievement award today from the association of computer linguists. a nice, energetic woman, can tell a lot about the very beginning of information retrieval and semantic computing. her first paper on the topic got published 1958. another one from 2002 she named language and information: old ideas, new achievement; and it was more or less her talk of today.

The slogan : in language and information processing - don’t look for meanings, count mentions Can it work?

her 2004 version: language and information processing: numbers that count

typewriter style presentation slides have their charm.

she gave credit to margaret masterman for getting her interested in the topic.

another paper on the history and very beginning of machine translation was written by feng zhiwei, korea.

``I have a text in front of me which is written in Russian but I am going to pretend that it is really written in English and that it has been coded in some strange symbols. All I need to do is strip off the code in order to retrieve the information contained in the text.'' (weaver, 1949)

everyone was really busy to analyse russian texts at that time. also karen sparck did. she says the reason for that was sputnik. she translated abstracts out of an russian research journal.

for my neurons sake, this time the conference wasn't organized by the forum, but by acl. becoming a trained conference lurker, i thought i didn't miss out any variation of presentation. jack mostow was a surprise. i have never listened to a keynote speaker, who choosed to overcome an introdruction by singing a song. i admit, i couldn't figure out why he choosed the title if i have a hammer, blabalbla, but a minute later he didn't give me any chance but to understand.

his talk was less surprising: listen: children talk, computer listens. experiences, statistics and open questions as: what problem is gonna to make a difference? the mistake he made, was deciding to close as he began. please, don't repeat a joke. that just adds a sour flavor.