북한의 언어정보처리 연구 현황

Present State of Language Processing in North Korea

Although the South and North Koreans are using same language and have ethnic homogeneity, unfortunately there were few communications and cultural exchanges between them since 1945. However after the summit meeting of both sides at Pyongyang in 2000, the relationship is dramatically changed. I have engaged in cooperative study between South and North Korea in the area of language processing and have succeeded in publishing the South and North Dictionary of Informational Terminologies in 1999. The world is changing everyday into the information- oriented society with its amazing technologies of communication and computation. If a nation or a country which is proud of its cultural superiority and heritage, neglects and do not participate such a change, it would be degraded as a backward country. Therefore, it is our task to overcome the political differences, to renewal the cultural and linguistic homogeneity and to develop it adapting to the information-oriented society. There are some resources for researching the current state of North Korea in studying the language information processing. For example, some book on computer linguistics published in North Korea and my experiences of discussing on the subject with North Korean scholars at ‘the International Conference for Computerization of Korean Language’ held three times in Yianbian, China. In addition to, I had some information about the language related software of North Korea from some South Korean scholars and companies. However, these resources are not enough to study this subject. In this situation of insufficiency of materials, a recently published book, titled as A Study on the Linguistics of DPRK, gives me a great help. After analyzing these materials, I have come to some assumptions on this subject. The research on computer linguistics in North Korea began as early as in 1960s under the influence of Russian linguistics. The institutions related to this are the Institute of Applied Linguistics in the Academy of Social Studies, the Korean Computer, the Pyongyang Information Center and some computer science departments of Universities in North Korea. The Institute of Applied Linguistics, most representative institute, have accomplished some studies on statistics of Korean Language and published the results of its researches on computer linguistics. In spite of the poor number of researches, it has engaged in some huge projects on the subject continuously with its good abilities and accuracies. Now, it is their and our task to strengthen and to develop our own language processing abilities in today’s competing world in the manner of cooperative including the exchanges of materials and scholars and doing joint projects on this subject.