rimary focus on high-quality multilingual
machine translation.

Within the CLIPS Laboratory (CLIPS: Communication langagiere et interaction
personne-systeme = Language Communication and Person-System Communication) of
the French IMAG Federation, the Groupe d'etude pour la traduction automatique
(GETA) (Study Group for Machine Translation) is a multi-disciplinary team of
computer scientists and linguists. Its research topics concern all the
theoretical, methodological and practical aspects of computer-assisted
translation (CAT), or more generally of multilingual computing. The GETA
participates in the UNL (Universal Networking Language) project, initiated by
the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) of the United Nations University (UNU).

"UNL (Universal Networking Language) is a language that - with its companion
"enconverter" and "deconverter" software - enables communication among peoples
of differing native languages. It will reside, as a plug-in for popular World
Wide Web browsers, on the Internet, and will be compatible with standard network
servers. The technology will be shared among the member states of the United
Nations. Any person with access to the Internet will be able to "enconvert" text
from any native language of a member state into UNL. Just as easily, any UNL
text can be "deconverted" from UNL into native languages. United Nations
University's UNL Center will work with its partners to create and promote the
UNL software, which will be compatible with popular network servers and
computing platforms."

The Natural Language Group (NLG) at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) of
the University of Southern California (USC) is currently involved in various
aspects of computational/natural language processing. The group's projects are:
machine translation; automated text summarization; multilingual verb access and
text management; development of large concept taxonomies (ontologies); discourse
and text generation; construction of large lexicons for various languages; and
multimedia communication.

Eduard Hovy, Head of the Natural Language Group, expained in his e-mail of
August 27, 1998:

"Your presentation outline looks very interesting to me. I do wonder, however,
where you discuss the language-related applications/functionalities that are not
translation, such as information retrieval (IR) and automated text summarization
(SUM). You would not be able to find anything on the Web without IR! -- all the