Some Remarks on: Language Technology — Myth or Reality?

In a small sector of the software market, there are products available that deal with written or spoken natural language. Among these software products are machine translation systems, database access systems, spelling checkers, retrieval systems etc. The astonishing fact about most of the products is that they are not based on techniques that are currently under discussion in the field of computational linguistics. This may be due to the necessary time lag between research, development and marketing. In some cases it seems to be a more substantial discrepancy where products are constructed without taking the scientific efforts sincerely into account.