This volume, the first of three dealing with a number of investigations and studies into the formal structure, advanced technology and application of large scale information processing systems, is concerned with the areas of compiler languages, natural languages and information storage and retrieval. The first report is entitled "Semantics and Grammatical Methods." The general goal in this investigation is to devise principles and methods sufficient for an accurate representation of the form and content of the phenomena in question--the phenomenon in one case being meaning, in the other case the cognitive analogues of meaning. The second report deals with "Computer Explorations of Context Theories of Meaning." An attempt is made to measure, independent of syntactic analyses, the features common to pairs of sentences in terms of commensurate physical similarity. The third report is "Information Retrieval" in which (1) the nature of information is investigated and (2) experiments are designed to monitor the information gathering process in order to evaluate on-line interactive retrieval systems. The last report, "Text Processing and Manipulation," covers the following: the Character Manipulation Language (CML), automation of the library search function, and text printing. (Author/RM)