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Investigations of natural language oriented towards the
needs of the emerging information technology in Bulgaria have their
origins in a period lasting a little more than a decade (1964 -1976)
when a group "Machine Translation and Mathematical Linguistics"
existed at the Institute of Mathematics of the Bulgarian Academy of
Sciences with a research program devoted to the problems of machine
translation (MT) and to quantitative and statistical studies of
Bulgarian language. Lead by Prof. Alexander Ljudskanov - an energetic
pioneer of computer applications to language - the group made some
important first steps in Russian-Bulgarian automatic translation and
their achievements marked the beginning of a professional approach to
the field. Our laboratory is a direct descendant of Ljudskanov's
group: not only because his co-workers are members of LML, but also
through the continuation of his research. Although nowadays MT and
machine aided translation (MAT) remain one of the most important
aspects of computer applications to natural language, time has added
other, equally important, concerns: creation of machine readable
dictionaries, syntactic parsing, representation of linguistic
knowledge , etc. All these issues form the core of a field called
language technology (LT). In the domain of LT academic research and
development activities in Bulgaria are concentrated mainly within the
frame-work of the Academy of Sciences. LT is institutionalized there
at three sites: the Institute of Informatics (LML), the Institute of
Mathematics (the Mathematical Linguistics Section) and the Bulgarian
Language Institute (the Language Modelling Group). Apart from these
units some work concerning NL processing is being carried out also at
the AI section of the Institute for Information Technologies.
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