Three years ago (June 6-8, 1975) a highly successful interdisciplinary workshop called TINLAP (Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing) was held at MIT with the purpose of "bringing together researchers and students from computational linguistics, psychology, linguistics and artificial intelligence to provide a forum at which people with different interests in, and consequently different emphases on, the problems of natural language understanding, could learn of the models developed and difficult issues faced by people working on other aspects of understanding." The workshop was organized by Roger Schank of Yale and Bonnie For TINLAP-2, I selected six topics which I felt were especially interesting from among those suggested by persons who had asked for another TINLAP meeting, and generated lists of questions to be considered by authors for four of the sessions; Session 2 questions were generated oy Bonnie Lynn Webber, and those in Session 5 are from Aravind Joshi. The lists of questions appear at the end of this volume. Authors were encouraged to summarize or criticize research, to speculate on language understanding mechanisms or future research directions, or to report recent work of their own.

Text generation is the processing of information that is stored at a higher level than grammatical structures and lexical items (such as sentences and words), organizing and re-expressing it so that it can appear as a worded text. Of course it interests those working on artificial intelligence, but it should also interest linguists as a linguistic research task.