This investigation matches the emerging techniques in computerized natural language processing against emerging needs for such techniques in the information field to evaluate and extend such techniques for future applications and to establish a basis and direction for further research toward these goals. An overview describes developments in the information field which have led to renewed interest in natural language processing, sketches of programs for processing natural language to fulfill language-based functions of information systems, and the relationship between information and language. The stages of processing unrestricted natural language input of scientific communication into data structures suitable for information processing--parsing, structural transformations of parse outputs, and arriving at an underlying semantically meaningful representation--are outlined. The report also describes research related to the computerized discovery of semantic structures in science subfields; this research is concerned with the problem of structuring a data base which is given in natural language. Examples and suggestions for the application of techniques currently available or under development to information problems, and suggestions for further research in the language area of information science are presented. (Author/KP)