Computational linguistics in 1990

Abstract

Coling's existence can today be measured in (reasonable fractions of) centuries.After twelve well-renowned international conferences arranged by the International Committee for Computational Linguistics and after an increasing number of publications and local meetings dedicated to the topic one might assume that all of us who care would by now know exactly what computational linguistics is about.We do not.Not only do we differ slightly on where we want to place the emphasis, the concept also evolves with each of us in the vague, successive way in which other words in human language so fruitfully keep changing.Computational linguistics is what we make it.No doubt computational linguistics is about computation and linguistics, with an emphasis on 'and'.The key concepts are computation, not computer, and linguistics, not language processing.All agree that the scope does not extend to studies, however good, about computation applied to language material unless some linguistic insight is at issue or about computer support for linguistics unless the computational procedure has some non-trivial linguistic aspect.What, then, is the core of the matter?I can give only a personal answer; let me do that.Thereafter I shall comment upon the harvest of papers offered to Coling 90.