MATHEMATICAL LINGUISTICS AND COMPUTATIONAL SEMANTICS IN ROMANIA, IN THE PERIOD ’60-‘80 EMIL IONESCU Besides reference works of Grigore Moisil and Solomon Marcus, which deserve a special analysis, mathematical and computational linguistics in Romania in the sixties are also represented by the pioneering works of two researchers, Erika Nistor and Eliza Roman. The environment of their contributions has two characteristics. The papers were published in reviews accessible only to a small scientific community; they mainly concentrated upon a specific problem, the one of the organization of information in a library (and, more generally, in a documentary center). The interest of the two researchers for the library science is hardly surprising. A library is the ancestor of the present-day web, and problems of information retrieval and information processing, which are central today in the field of Information Technology, emerged first as challenges in the field of library documents. As for the fact that the contributions of the two researchers have been published in rather marginal publications (except in the eighties), this explains their limited audience. This article aims to do justice to these works and to emphasize – for those who are rather inclined to ignore the recent past – that the papers referred to here are part of the living history of mathematical and computational linguistics in Romania. To put things in a chronological order, we ought to point out first to the interest of the two researchers for the so-called “languages of documentation” (Nistor, Roman 1968a). As is well-known, these languages are tools used in the process of information retrieval applied to a specific field, the one of the library organization. The book to which the authors make reference in this respect is the classic work of Maurice Coyaud (Coyaud 1966). A very clear introduction to what was to be the main topics in computational linguistics may be found in Domonkos-Nistor and Roman (1967) (see also Nistor- Domonkos, Roman 1967). The reader discovers in these articles definitions of subfields, such as writing and speech recognition, text summarization, speech synthesis and machine translation, all along with an overview of the achievements made at that time in these subfields. RRL, LI, 3–4, p. 511–515, Bucureşti, 2006