The workshop that inspired this book was the high point of a collaborative research project entitled ‘Incorporation of Semantics into Computational Linguistics’, supported by the EEC through the COST13 programme. The workshop was also the first official academic event to be organized by IDSIA, a newly inaugurated institute of the Dalle Molle Foundation situated in Lugano, Switzerland devoted to artificial intelligence research.

A few words about the project may help to place the contents of the book in its proper context. The underlying theme was that although human language is studied from the standpoint of many different disciplines, there is rather less constructive interaction between the disciplines than might be hoped for, and that for such interaction to take place, a common framework of some kind must be established. Computational linguistics (CL) and artificial intelligence (AI) were singled out as particular instances of such disciplines: each has focused on rather different aspects of the relationship between language and computation.

Thus, what we now call CL grew out of attempts to apply the concepts of computer science to generative linguistics (e.g. Zwicky and his colleagues [255], Petrick [181]). Given these historical origins, CL unwittingly inherited some of the goals for linguistic theory that we normally associate with Chomskyan linguistics. One such goal, for example, is to finitely describe linguistic competence, that is, the knowledge that underlies the human capacity for language by means of a set of universal principles that characterize the class of possible languages, and a set of descriptions for particular languages.