The Readings were organized in memory of our outstanding colleague and teacher, the founder of Russian Language Engineering (Computer Linguistics), a pioneer of Machine Translation (MT) in Russia Raimund Piotrowski. It was thanks to R. Piotrowski’s research and writings that not only automatic dictionary building technologies and practical MT systems were developed and applied, but an Evidence-Based research methodology in humanitarian studies and a Language Engineering strategies in research and didactic spheres were formulated and exercised as well.
Raimund Piotrowski was a Soviet and Russian scholar philologist, whose sphere of interest were such fields as Romance philology, Quantitative Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. He was the initiator of such schools of Evidence-Based philology as Language Engineering and Linguistic Synergetics (in Russia), originator of Linguistic Automata Theory. Under his supervision the first experimental systems of linguistic technologies (Natural Text Processing systems and practical multilanguage systems of Machine Translation) were created in the Soviet Union [Piotrowski 2007; Piotrowski et al. 1994].
He was a Full member of many academic institutions, both in Russia and abroad; thus, among others, he was Honorary Professor of the UNESCO, Honorary Professor of Herzen State University of Russia, Corresponding Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Actual Member of the Cybernetic Academy Odobleja, Member of the International Society for Computer Linguistics and, of course, of the International Quantitative Linguistics Association.
Raimund Piotrowski was the author of more than 300 publications, among which were the following scientific and text books: "Article Formation in Romance Languages" [Piotrowski 2008], "Language Engineering and Language Theory" [Piotrowski 1979], "Text, Computer, Mensch" [Piotrowski 1984], "Mathematical Linguistics" [Piotrovsky 1985], "Linguistic Automaton" [Piotrowski 1999], "Linguistic Synergetics. Reference Positions First Results, Perspectives" [Piotrowski 2006].
He was scientific editor of the international encyclopedia "Quantitative Linguistik. Ein internationales Handbuch" [Koehler et al. 2005].
The law of language changes is known as Piotrowski’s law [Best 2008].
134 PhD and 14 Full Doctor theses were defended under his scientific supervision [R. Piotrowski’s Bibliography 2004].
R. Piotrowski was the creator and chief of "Speech Statistics" International Group [Kelich 2008] and Language Engineering Laboratory in Leningrad State Pedagogical Institute named after A.I. Herzen. Within 1948−1954 and 1966−1974 he was dean of foreign languages department in this Institute and chair of French, Spanish, and then Romance Philology Chair.
In Herzen State Pedagogical University R. Piotrowski was the chair of Applied Linguistics Unit with two laboratories: Language Engineering Laboratory and Machine Translation Laboratory, he organized an inter-university Centre of Theoretical and Applied Computer Researches in Philology and was its permanent director.