Further to my history blog of the other day, here’s a taster of the sort of topic threads that could be followed up in a comprehensive history of language technology in the loosest sense of the term –i.e. engineering devices or media designed to enhance, accelerate or transmit linguistic performance. For this series, I’ve simply trawled back from 2004 as a baseline for ‘round number’ years in Europe and the U.S.

1714: In the UK Henry Mill received the first patent for a typewriter.

“An artificial machine or method for the impressing or transcribing of letters singly or progressively one after another, as in writing, whereby all writing whatever may be engrossed in paper or parchment so neat and exact as not to be distinguished from print.”

As it happened, the first mass-produced typewriter was not launched until 1874 in the U.S.!

1824 The 15-year old Louis Braille demonstrated his new 6-dot cell Braille alphabet for the blind in Paris.

1834 Jules Verne published Les tribulations d’un chinois en Chine, in which is imagined two Chinese people in vocorrespondence, using a system of phonographs and disks as and epistolary media. (Has anyone seen the 1965 film made from this novel with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Ursula Andress?)

Coincidentally, Charles Babbage conceived his analytical engine, forerunner of the computer the same year.

1844 Samuel Morse transmitted that famous first message by morse over a telegraph line. What God hath wrought travelled faster than any message before in history from Washington, DC to Baltimore. (The quote is from the St James translation of the Bible, Numbers 23:23 There is no soothsaying in Jacob, nor divination in Israel. In their times it shall be told to Jacob and to Israel what God hath wrought. Not exactly a vast range of alphabetical letters being morsed there.

1854 George Boole published An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. The guy who set down the original logic of our Boolean searches

1884 James Murray and the Oxford University Press published Part 1 of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, setting high standards for huge cost overruns in print dictionaries. Waterman produced the first fountain pen this year, too.

1894 Ludwig Zamenhof put forward a ‘reformed’ version of his Esperanto auxiliary language, in response to demands for simplified grammar. These reforms were not accepted by Esperantists.

1924 The International Auxiliary Language Association was founded as a non-profit organization to promote widespread study, discussion, and publicity of all questions involved in the establishment of an auxiliary language. It was in part a response to the shock of World War I, and the belief that international conflict could be mitigated by developing a better linguistic framework for international communication. There was also thinking along similar lines by ‘experts’ at the League of Nations which flourished briefly at this time. Plus ça change…

1934 The Belgian researcher Paul Otlet, a pioneer in what we’d today call knowledge management, published his path-breaking Traité de documentation, all done with photographs and filing cabinets. Similar ideas were emegring in Vannevar Bush’s Memex concept.

By 1944, the first shoots of what would become digital language technology were sprouting in the minds of Turing and company, the inventors of symbol processing machines. By January of 1954 – just over fifty years ago today – Leon Dostert demonstrated the brand new Georgetown-IBM machine translation system .

Watch this space for more on the last half century of language technology.

The event agenda is filling up fast. Among other offerings this season in Europe, I’m told there are still 25 places left for the 2nd Summer Seminar for Financial Translators to be held in La Baule in Brittanny from July 5-7.

One unusual (and prestigious) speaker will be Johnny Grimond, writer at large for The Economist and author of The Economist Style Guide who will be talking on the virtues of stylistic simplicity for translators. The idea is to enhance discussion about translators as ‘writers’ rather than cross-lingual speed typists, as some urban legends have been claiming. By the way, if you need a good one stop source for European trranslation community events, check the UK Institute of Translation and Interpretation (ITI) events page.

Henry Ford said history was bunk. James Joyce suggested history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake. Others claim that ignorance of history will condemn us to repeat it. The history of language technology is so far neither bunkum nor nightmare. Indeed, apart from one or two illustrious exceptions it hardly exists yet. There must be a wealth of material just on the web, but so far no one yet seems to have structured it into useful timelines or offered a course on the topic.

I’ve been tinkering with the idea of collecting some basic materials on language tech history for some time. The field is huge yet divides easily enough into pre and post-digital technology. Obviously, digital language technology began with the advent of the computer in around 1945, so its history can in theory be charted from obvious usually accessible sources. One Canadian project called Infolingua (now cashless?) actually began work on collecting references to what it calls perilinguistics (“the body of knowledge and technology that deals with phenomena and problems having a linguistic component’ mainly covering automatic language processing, but also sociology and psycholinguistics). The database of 73,846 bibliographical entries for language techie type topics dated 1994 (!), claims 152 references from 1950-54, 848 from 54-59, 2,343 for 60-64 and 4005 up to 1970, etc. So that’s a start, even though it is not organized with a historical perspective in mind.

The true pioneer in this area, is John Hutchins, who has almost single-handedly been charting the development of machine translation from its beginnings and making most of his work available for free. He has recently launched a ‘repository’ for papers on MT and the first results can be found here. In fact, he is looking for a friendly website to house this collection permanently, so I’d encourage you to contact him via his site if you can help.

However, in addition to published sources, we need as full a record as possible of the people who developed this digital technology, and what they actually did and thought about the field over time. In other words, we need an oral history of language technology, not just a timeline of facts and technical publications. We want a record of the joys and sufferings of life in the lab.

John Hutchins and I have talked about launching an oral history of language technology, using the sort of approach used by the American Association of Artificial Intelligence for various AI topics (but not NLP it seems) or by the ACM on the development of neural nets .

Obviously to run interviews and capture some of the last 50 years before memories melt away, you would need to break the language tech field down into bite sized topical chunks (speech (recognition, synthesis, etc), dictionaries, translation, summarization, etc.). You would also have to ask appropriate pioneers or witnesses in a swathe of countries (US, Canada, W and E Europe, Russia, Japan, China, Korea, etc) to reminisce under the right conditions, so that the spoken results would eventually be databased for later cross-referencing etc. This adds up to a vast amount of oral history.

Such an undertaking would need extensive organization and funding, be backed by the right legal framework, and provide long term sustainability. This seems to point to an academic or professional institution, with branches in different countries and database and web resources commensurate with the scale of the task. Any offers?

However, there’s a strong case for starting on a modest basis (e.g. with the more elderly of our colleagues) to test the waters and scope the task. Perhaps a cluster of PhD students all working in a related area of language technology in one country could be persuaded to orient their research to this historical challenge. Possibly media or communications history departments (rather than the NLP people) might be tempted to have a go.

The history of linguistics is now a full-blooded discipline, as is the history of computing and to a lesser degree the history of translation. Isn’t it about time language technology got the same sort of historical treatment?

The 10th Linguapax is being held in Barcelona May 20 – 23. This UNESCO-inspired congress is devoted to linguistic rights, language diversity, and the search for harmonious development through balanced language policies. Keep your eyes skinned for the upcoming Report on Languages of the World , commissioned by a former UNESCO secretary general and now in the editing stage (by a Basque organization). Spain decidedly seems to be cornering the market in language policy get-togethers. Barcelona hosted the last Linguapax as well as the World Congress on Language Policies in April.  An academic group called Europa Diversa has also been drafting a proposal to include more responsible linguistic diversity clauses in the yet to be voted European Convention.