Publication
Proceedings of the EACL 2009 Workshop on the Interaction between Linguistics and Computational Linguistics: Virtuous, Vicious or Vacuous?
Timothy Baldwin; Valia Kordoni (Hrsg.)
Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL-2009), March 30 - April 3, Athens, Greece, EACL, 2009.
Abstract
This workshop is an attempt to bring together a range of linguists and computational linguists who
operate across or near the computational "divide", to reflect on the relationship between the two fields,
including the following questions:
- What contributions has computational linguistics made to linguistics, and vice versa?
- What are examples of success/failure of marrying linguistics and computational linguistics, and
what can we learn from them?
- How can we better facilitate the virtuous cycle between computational linguistics and linguistics?
- Is modern-day computational linguistics relevant to current-day linguistics, and vice versa? If not,
should it be made more relevant, and how?
- What do linguistics and computational linguistics stand to gain from greater cross-awareness
between the two fields?
- What untapped areas/aspects of linguistics are ripe for cross-fertilisation with computational
linguistics, and vice versa?
On the basis of exploring answers to these and other questions, the workshop aims to explore possible
trajectories for linguistics and computational linguistics, in terms of both concrete low-level tasks and
high-level aspirations/synergies.
In its infancy, computational linguistics drew heavily on theoretical linguistics. There have been
numerous examples of co-development successes between computational and theoretical linguistics
over the years (e.g. syntactic theories, discourse processing and language resource development), and
significant crossover with other areas of linguistics such as psycholinguistics and corpus linguistics.
Throughout the history of the field, however, there has always been a subset of computational linguistics
which has openly distanced itself from theoretical linguistics, perhaps most famously in the field of
machine translation (MT) where there is relatively little in the majority of "successful" MT systems
that a linguist would identify with. In the current climate of hard-core empiricism within computational
linguistics it is appropriate to reflect on where we have come from and where we are headed relative
to the various other fields of linguistics. As part of this reflection, it is timely to look beyond
theoretical linguistics to the various other fields of linguistics which have traditionally received less
exposure in computational linguistics, including sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, neurolinguistics
and evolutionary linguistics.
We would like to thank all of our invited speakers and panelists for agreeing to participate in the
workshop and help shape the debate. We would also like to thank the workshop chairs and local
organisers of EACL 2009 for all of their behind-the-scenes efforts, without which this workshop would
not have been possible. The workshop is endorsed by the Erasmus Mundus European Masters Program
in Language and Communication Technologies (LCT; http://lct-master.org).
Timothy Baldwin
Valia Kordoni