Menbers of the Department are active in research in the areas of: 1) Translation of texts from one language to another, 2) Computer-based language learning, and 3) The use of natural language in computer databases and expert systems.

To support these research activities, 15 years ago the Department established its own research centre, the Centre for Computational Liguistics(CCL). There have been several machine translation projects under way, some concerned with technical texts, such as those that cause a major workload for the European Community (which funds some of this research) and other multinational organisations. Other projects include the following: text categorisation - classifying on-line newspaper texts or news-wire stories by analysing their content linguistically; pragmatic natural language dialogue for conducting local government administration and referenda; text-speech processing; language vision work involving the generation of pictorial representation of a linguistically-expressed description.

CCL,UMIST

UMIST(the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology), the oldest of the four universities, was founded in 1824 in the days of the first Industrial Revolution and is one of the very first technical institutions of its kind in the world. UMIST has an academic staff of 450 and a total of 5,800 students of which a third are postgraduates. There are 21 major academic departments and several specialist research centres, many of which are at the forefront of their field in science, engineering and management science. In a recent Government survey of researcn quality in all 100 UK universities, UMIST was ranked overall in seventh position.