I am honored and happy to be part of this promising scientific conference. As teacher of German as Foreign Language, I am very much interested in discovering related fields. As I understand Computational Linguistics (CL) is not just the combination of the two academic fields of linguistics and computer science. CL consists of aspects of several disciplines besides those two, namely mathematics, philosophy, cognitive psychology and of course philology. This interdisciplinary approach enables CL to find solutions at the interface of the two most vital spheres of modern societies: communication and IT.

CL’s core interest is to enable machines to understand natural languages as uttered by humans. Since machines communicate in formal languages, they cannot understand natural languages in their full complexity and ambiguity. The further development regarding this task will bring huge benefit not only for the interaction between humans and machines, but also for the interaction between machines, speaking of artificial intelligence.

Huge efforts have already been made regarding for example the sphere of voice recognition and machine translation as we all know. But we also know that there is still much potential to improve the existing technics. This is why the chances for graduates of this field should be very promising.

CL can of course also be studied in Germany, where about 30 universities offer study programmes in German or English language, so I would be happy to see some of your students applying for a master in CL in Germany.

I wish you and all of us a good proceeding of this conference.