The application of the Ferranti Mercury computer to linguistic problems

In a book published in 19581 (Booth et al., 1958) and hereafter called MRLP Booth, Brandwood, and Cleave discussed at some length the various ways in which electronic computers could be applied to resolving linguistic problems, and gave an account of the results obtained at the Birkbeck College Computational Laboratory. Since that time, the University of London has acquired a Ferranti Mercury computer which, though primarily designed for the solution of mathematical problems (and making use of floating point arithmetic), has a large immediate-access store and a great speed which make it very suitable for linguistic work. This acquisition has made it possible to put into practice on a full scale many of the ideas which the book contained. The present paper elaborates upon some of these ideas with particular reference to the way in which they are affected by the design of the Mercury. The paper is divided into several sections and the first devoted to a description of the Mercury insofar as it affects the design of linguistic programmes. The basic ideas behind the dictionary searching methods described in Section V appeared in MRLP. The minor discrepancies between some of the mathematical results in this section and the corresponding ones in MRLP are due to the assumption in the latter that this size of dictionary is large. It will become apparent that this assumption cannot always be made in dealing with the Mercury.