Father Busa is dead
Pioneer of Computing in Humantities with Index Thomisticus, dies at 98.
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In 1946, when computers were few enormous machines, oddly slow for today’s standards, and Internet wasn’t even an idea, a young Italian Jesuit priest planned to use machines and language elaboration for a titanic enterprise: organizing the immense work of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Thanks to Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, in 1949, when he published his degree thesis in Philosophy at the Papal Gregorian University of Rome, entitled “The Thomistic Terminology of Interiority”, father Roberto Busa could start his work. With his foresight and endurance Father Busa gained the reputation as a prophet and pioneer of digital research methods in the humanities subsumed today under the trendy term e-humanities.
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/...
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Sergei Perschke passed away
Sergei played a very important role for the European MT and NLP community. Most will remember him as the European Commission official behind EUROTRA, the large EC-funded international MT project running from 1983 until 1994.
The resulting EUROTRA system translated between the nine official EC languages. Although the system never reached the maturity needed for practical application, the project fostered the development of computational linguistics in many parts of Europe and influenced subsequent work on rule-base MT.
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http://www.lt-world.org/news/...
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