 The methods employed in theoretical and practical research in computational linguistics have often drawn upon theories and findings in theoretical linguistics, philosophical logic, cognitive science (especially psycholinguistics), and of course computer science. However, early work from the mid-1950s to around 1970 tended to be rather theory-neutral, the primary concern being the development of practical techniques for such applications as MT and simple QA. In MT, central issues were lexical structure and content, the characterization of “sublanguages” for particular domains (for example, weather reports), and the transduction from one language to another (for example, using rather ad hoc graph transformation grammars or transfer grammars). In QA, the concern was with characterizing the question patterns encountered in a specific domain, and the relationship of these question patterns to the forms in which answers might stored, for instance in a relational database.