The paper reviews the state of the art of natural language engineering (NLE) around 1995, when this journal first appeared, and makes a critical comparison with the current state of the art in 2018, as we prepare the 25th Volume. Specifically the then state of the art in parsing, information extraction, chatbots, and dialogue systems, speech processing and machine translation are briefly reviewed. The emergence in the 1980s and 1990s of machine learning (ML) and statistical methods (SM) is noted. Important trends and areas of progress in the subsequent years are identified. In particular, the move to the use of n-grams or skip grams and/or chunking with part of speech tagging and away from whole sentence parsing is noted, as is the increasing dominance of SM and ML. Some outstanding issues which merit further research are briefly pointed out, including metaphor processing and the ethical implications of NLE.

Natural Language Engineering really came about from a meeting between Roberto Garigliano (then of Durham University) and myself in his office in late 1992 or early 1993. I had returned to academia the previous year after a spell doing a variety of jobs in industry, and had become aware of Roberto and the Natural Language Group at Durham (just about 15 miles from the University of Sunderland where I was working). Roberto and I discussed several possible avenues of cooperation, including sponsorship by Durham of students on existing Sunderland masters degrees, a joint Durham/Sunderland specialist Masters in Language Engineering (which came to nothing) and a new journal focused on practical, engineering work in the language domain. Incidentally, one of the sponsored master’s students was Siobhan Devlin, now Head of Computing at Sunderland.

Nominations are now open for the 2013 Annual Karen Spärck Jones Award – awarded to outstanding researchers in Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval who have been awarded their PhD in the past ten years. The panel especially welcomes nominations for researchers who have a significant experimental component in their work.

David L. Waltz died on March 22, 2012 after suffering from brain cancer.

Dave was a good friend to Natural Language Engineering, and provided some sage advice when Roberto Garigliano and I started working on the proposed journal in the early 1990s; he subsequently agreed to serve as a founding editorial board member.

Having been engaged at intervals during the last few years in studying from a physiological point of view the coagulation of crustacean blood—Tait (08), (10, A and B), (11)—and finding more variation in this regard in different Crustacea than has hitherto been recognized, it suggested itself to me to inquire if the observed differences are correlated with any special physiological peculiarities, and, further, if they depend in marked degree on phylogenetic relationship. It is not a simple matter to settle either of these questions, and I make no pretence to have done so. At the same time, I have thought it worth while to put my observations on record, in the hope that the matter may thus sooner arrive at a satisfactory settlement.