The future is difficult to predict, as we all know. Looking at my work and the field of language technology we can see a lot of new exciting ideas being developed at the moment. Computational linguistics is still a very young discipline in the way that it doesn’t yet know if it would rather want to be called language technology, natural language processing or language engineering. Nevertheless it has become an established research subject and its results have already had a deep impact on society and everyday life.

My dream for the future is that language barriers are gone completely and communication between people (and machines) is possible without linguistic discrimination and misunderstandings. All the technology mankind is developing requires natural interfaces and this presupposes strong and reliable language technology. The future has started already and natural language understanding is soon at our fingertips. Let’s make it serve our needs and avoid turning it against us.