Prof. Alain Colmerauer, the father of Prolog, took an academic visit to AMSS and delivered a lecture titled “From Natural Language Processing to Prolog” on April 8, 2011.

Prof. Alain Colmerauer introduced the implementation of the W-grammars formalism and the definition and implementation of the Q-systems for the automatic English-French translation. Then, he recounted the creation of the first Prolog with the purpose of processing a text in French in an interactive mode. Besides, the successive developments of Prolog II, Prolog III and Prolog IV were presented at the end of the lecture.

Prof. Alain Colmerauer is the creator of the logic programming language Prolog and was praised as the father of Prolog because of the invention of it in 1972. For his outstanding contributions on Prolog, he was awarded France Software Golden Apple Prize and elected the Correspondence Member of the French Academy of Sciences in the area of Mathematics. He also was one of the founders in the constraint logic programming and was honored with “Outstanding Research Award” by Constraint Programming Society.