Natural Language and Databases has been a common panel topic for some years, partly because it has been an active area of work, but more importantly, because it has been widely assumed that database access is a good test environment for language research. I thought the time had come to look again at this assumption, and that it would be useful, for COLING 84, to do this. I therefore invited the members of the Panel to speak to the proposition (developed below) that database query is no longer a good, let alone the best, test environment for language processing.
