The papers in this panel consider machine-readable dictionaries from several perspectives: research in computational linguistics and computational lexicology, the development of tools for improving accessibility, the design of lexical reference systems for educational purposes, and applications of machine-readable dictionaries in information science contexts. As background and by way of introduction, a description is provided of a workshop on machine-readable dictionaries that was held at SRI International in April 1983.

AnnualMeeting represents our 20th anniversary.We did, Of course, change our name to the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1968, but that did not affect the continuity of the organization.The date of this panel, 17 June, misses the real anniversary by four days, but no matter; the occasion still allows us to reflect on where we have been and where we are going.I seem to be sensitive to opportunities for celebrations.In looking through my AMTCL/ACL correspondence over the years, I came across a copy of a memo sent to Bob Simmons and Hood Roberts during our lOth anniversary year, recommending that something in commemoration might be appropriate.I cannot identify anything in the program of that meeting or in my notes about it that suggests they took me seriously then, but that reflects the critical difference between volunteering a recommendation and Just plain volunteerlngl

No abstract available.

Stanford Research Institute (SRI) is participating in a major program of research on the analysis of continuous speech by computer. The goal is the development of a speech understanding system capable of engaging a human operator in a natural conversation about a specific problem domain. The approach being taken is distinctive in the extent to which it depends on syntactic and semantic processing to guide the acoustic analysis. This correspondence provides a description of the first version of the system, emphasizing the kinds of information that need to be added for effective results.