Other developments are less spectacular. There's a steady improvement in the performance of systems that can decide whether an ambiguous word such as "bat" means "flying mammal" or "sports tool" or "to hit"; there is solid work on cross-language information retrieval (which you will soon see in being able to find Chinese and French documents on the web even though you type in English-only queries), and there is some rather rapid development of systems that answer simple questions automatically (rather like the popular web system AskJeeves, but this time done by computers, not humans). These systems refer to a large collection of text to find 'factiods' (not opinions or causes or chains of events) in response to questions such as 'what is the capital of Uganda?' or 'how old is President Clinton?' or 'who invented the xerox process?', and they do so rather better than I had expected."

# ISSCO

In Geneva, Switzerland, ISSCO (Dalle Molle Institute for Semantic and Cognitive Studies - Institut Dalle Molle pour les Études Sémantiques et Cognitives) is a research laboratory conducting basic and applied research in computational linguistics (CL) and artificial intelligence (AI), for a number of Swiss and European research projects. The University of Geneva has provided administrative support and infrastructure. Research is funded with grants and contracts with public and private bodies.

Created by the Foundation Dalle Molle in 1972 to conduct research in cognition and semantics, ISSCO has come to specialize in natural language processing, including multilingual language processing, in a number of areas: machine translation, linguistic environments, multilingual generation, discourse processing, data collection, etc. ISSCO is multi-disciplinary and multi-national. As explained on its website in 1998, "its staff and its visitors [are drawn] from the disciplines of computer science, linguistics, mathematics, psychology and philosophy. The long-term staff of the Institute is relatively small in number; with a much larger number of visitors coming for stays ranging from a month to two years. This ensures a continual exchange of ideas and encourages flexibility of approach amongst those associated with the Institute."

# UNDL Foundation

The UNL (universal networking language) project was launched in the mid-1990s as a main digital metalanguage project by the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) of the United Nations University (UNU) in Tokyo, Japan. As explained on the bilingual (English, Japanese) website in 1998: "UNL is a language that — with its companion 'enconverter' and 'deconverter' software — enables communication among peoples of differing native languages. It will reside, as a plug-in for popular web browsers, on the internet, and will be compatible with standard network servers. The technology will be shared among the member states of the United Nations. Any person with access to the internet will be able to 'enconvert' text from any native language of a member state into UNL. Just as easily, any UNL text can be 'deconverted' from UNL into native languages. United Nations University's UNL Center will work with its partners to create and promote the UNL software, which will be compatible with popular network servers and computing platforms."

In 2000, 120 researchers worldwide were working on a multilingual project in 16 languages (Arabic, Brazilian, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindu, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Mongolian, Russian, Spanish, Swahiki, and Thai). The UNDL Foundation (UNDL: Universal Networking Digital Language) was founded in January 2001 to develop and promote the UNL project.

CHRONOLOGY

[Each line begins with the year or the year/month.]

1968: ASCII is the first character set encoding.
1971: Project Gutenberg is the first digital library.
1974: The internet takes off.
1990: The web is invented by Tim Berners-Lee.
1991/01: Unicode is a universal character set encoding for all languages.
1993/11: Mosaic is the first web browser.
1994/05: The Human-Languages Page is a catalog of language-related internet resources.
1994/10: The World Wide Web Consortium will deal with internationalization and localization.
1994: Travland is dedicated to both travel and languages.
1995/12: The Kotoba Home Page deals with language issues using our keyboard.
1995: The Internet Dictionary Project works on creating free translating dictionaries.
1995: NetGlos is a multilingual glossary of internet terminology.
1995: Global Reach is a virtual consultancy stemming from Euro-Marketing Associates.
1995: LISA is the localization industry standards association.
1995: "The Ethnologue: Languages of the World" offers a free online version.
1996/04 : OneLook Dictionaries is a fast finder in online dictionaries.
1997/01: UNL (universal networking language) is a digital metalanguage project.
1997/12: AltaVista launches AltaVista Translation, also called Babel Fish.
1997: The Logos Dictionary goes online for free.
1999/12: Britannica.com is the first main English-language online encyclopedia.
1999/12: WebEncyclo is the first main French-language online encyclopedia.
1999: WordReference.com offers free online bilingual translating dictionaries.
2000/02: yourDictionary.com is a major language portal.
2000/07: Non-English-speaking internet users reach 50%.
2001/01: Wikipedia is a main free multilingual cooperative encyclopedia.
2001/01: The UNDL Foundation develops UNL, a digital metalanguage project.
2001/04: The Human-Languages Project becomes the iLoveLanguages portal.
2004/01: Project Gutenberg Europe is launched as a multilingual project.
2007/03: IATE is the new terminological database of the European Union.
2009: "The Ethnologue" launches its 16th edition as an encyclopedic reference work.