A tape dictionary for linguistic experiments

Almost since the arrival of the first piece of modern computing equipment there has been considerable interest in the potential of this equipment for various aspects of linguistic data handling. Experiments in machine translation date to at least the late forties and more recently experiments in indexing and abstracting are becoming more widespread. Almost without exception these experiments have shown that the basic problems are not trivial and that serious experimentation on an extensive level will be necessary before any of these problems can be conquered---even assuming that solutions of some sort can be found. As a result there has been an increasing amount of speculation about the fundamental nature of linguistic structure and a growing need for fundamental data on which various conjectures about this structure can be tested.