A survey on Human Language Technology Terminology

This article originates from the revision of a 1969 unpublished article by Professor Antonio Zampolli carried out by Gabriella Pardelli and Manuela Sassi, two of his collaborators at the Institute of Computational Linguistics in Pisa. It is a technical report titled "Due Conversazioni sul Panorama Attuale della Linguistica Computazionale", drawn up by Zampolli on the occasion of two lectures at the Istituto di Matematica Ulisse Dini of Florence in June 1969. A synthesis of the introductory part - mainly based on some classifications for the various areas of Computational Linguistics - is reported here because the most interesting from the point of view of the relationship between automatic processing of linguistic data and other sciences. The rich bibliographic part has been extracted as well from the report and used for a terminological statistical analysis. Some sections, for example those on the International Conference on Computational Linguistics of 1969 and on the "Sezione Linguistica" of CNUCE in Pisa, have not - or only partly - been taken into account because already published by Zampolli in other books and journals (and not because considered less important). The whole revised technical report will soon be published in the "Quaderni di Linguistica Computazionale" edited by the Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale. The paper is divided in three parts: the first section is a terminological overview on the use of terms such like Computational Linguistics, Applied Linguistics and Mathematical Linguistics; the second has a statistical approach and shows the graphical representation of terms extracted from bibliographies and used in the 1960s; lastly, the conclusions. This contribution is a "historical" document which places itself at the beginning of a field which afterwards knew an exceptional development and it highlights both the continuity and the change which brought to the present Human Language Technology.