Key applications

The data-intensive approach seems to us applicable to at least the following

• Explicit models of language acquisition.
• Providing raw materials for psycholinguistic simulations of language behaviour.
• Focussing the efforts of linguists on topics, such as compound nouns, which matter more in real life than in current linguistic theory
• Retrieving information.
• Classifying and organising texts and text collections.
• Authorship attribution and forensic linguistics.
• Guiding the choices made by systems which generate text that is supposed to be easy to understand.
• Speech recognition and adaptive user interfaces
• Authoring aids and translation aids
• Cryptography and computer security

It is clear that that the last three applications are the ones with the most immediate commercial potential, and that the significance of cryptographic work in affecting our history has already been very great