Proceedings of the 21st annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics -

Abstract

This volume provides a record of the proceedings of the 21st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, held a t the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 15 to 18 June 1983. It contains both the refereed papers presented at the meeting, and written versions of two of the three invited talks given there.As a reflection of continuing growth and specialization within computational linguistics, the program committee felt that several intellectual developments of potentially wide interest require some introduction for non-specialists. We invited the authors of submitted papers in two of these areas to give instead more extensive presentations with more tutorial content, and they kindly accepted our invitations. The meeting included an invited talk by David Israel on computational implications of Barwise and Perry's newly emergent theory of situation semantics and a tutorial overview by Mark Liberman on the new round of applications of techniques from artificial intelligence and computational linguistics to low-level speech analysis and phonetically-based speech recognition (not included in the proceedings).The sole panel discussion at the meeting is closely linked to a set of papers which are part of a new wave of work focusing on the computational complexity of various grammatical formalisms and on the relevance of such analyses. The program committee felt the differing views expressed in these papers strongly invited wider discussion. Ray Perrault organized a panel on these topics, and set the stage with a tutorial presenting relevant formal underpinnings and historical background.