Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics draws upon linguistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, mathematics, logic, philosophy, cognitive science, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, anthropology and neuroscience, among others.
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders of semiotics, or semiology, as Saussure called it.
Corpus linguistics is the study of a language as that language is expressed in its text corpus, its body of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feasible with corpora collected in the field—the natural context ("realia") of that language—with minimal experimental interference.
In the study of language, description or descriptive linguistics is the work of objectively analyzing and describing how language is actually used by a speech community.
Semantic prosody, also discourse prosody, describes the way in which certain seemingly neutral words can be perceived with positive or negative associations through frequent occurrences with particular collocations. Coined in analogy to linguistic prosody, popularised by Bill Louw.
A concordancer is a computer program that automatically constructs a concordance. The output of a concordancer may serve as input to a translation memory system for computer-assisted translation, or as an early step in machine translation.
Syntactic Structures is an influential work in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, originally published in 1957. It is an elaboration of his teacher Zellig Harris's model of transformational generative grammar. A short monograph of about a hundred pages, Chomsky's presentation is recognized as one of the most significant studies of the 20th century. It contains the now-famous sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", which Chomsky offered as an example of a grammatically correct sentence that has no discernible meaning. Thus, Chomsky argued for the independence of syntax from semantics.
Dr. Hermann Moisl is a retired senior lecturer and visiting fellow in Linguistics at Newcastle University. He was educated at various institutes, including Trinity College Dublin and the University of Oxford.
In linguistics, a treebank is a parsed text corpus that annotates syntactic or semantic sentence structure. The construction of parsed corpora in the early 1990s revolutionized computational linguistics, which benefitted from large-scale empirical data.
Collostructional analysis is a family of methods developed by Stefan Th. Gries and Anatol Stefanowitsch. Collostructional analysis aims at measuring the degree of attraction or repulsion that words exhibit to constructions, where the notion of construction has so far been that of Goldberg's construction grammar.
Geoffrey Neil Leech FBA was a specialist in English language and linguistics. He was the author, co-author, or editor of over 30 books and over 120 published papers. His main academic interests were English grammar, corpus linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics, and semantics.
Corpora is a three times yearly peer-reviewed linguistic academic journal that publishes scholarly articles and book reviews on corpus linguistics, with a focus on corpus construction and corpus technology. It is edited by Tony McEnery.
Language and Computers: Studies in Practical Linguistics is a book series on corpus linguistics and related areas. As studies in linguistics, volumes in the series have, by definition, their foundations in linguistic theory; however, they are not concerned with theory for theory's sake, but always with a definite direct or indirect interest in the possibilities of practical application in the dynamic area where language and computers meet.
Stefan Th. Gries is (full) professor of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Honorary Liebig-Professor of the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, and since 1 April 2018 also Chair of English Linguistics at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen.
Sandra Annear Thompson is an American linguist specializing in discourse analysis, typology, and interactional linguistics. She is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She has published numerous books, her research has appeared in many linguistics journals, and she serves on the editorial board of several prominent linguistics journals.
Contrastive linguistics is a practice-oriented linguistic approach that seeks to describe the differences and similarities between a pair of languages.
Law and corpus linguistics (LCL) is a new academic sub-discipline that uses large databases of examples of language usage equipped with tools designed by linguists called corpora to better get at the meaning of words and phrases in legal texts. Thus, LCL is the application of corpus linguistic tools, theories, and methodologies to issues of legal interpretation in much the same way law and economics is the application of economic tools, theories, and methodologies to various legal issues.
Vladimir Plungian is a Russian linguist, specialist in linguistic typology and theory of grammar, morphology, corpus linguistics, African studies, poetics.
Distributionalism was a general theory of language and a discovery procedure for establishing elements and structures of language based on observed usage. It can be seen as an elaboration of structuralism but takes a more computational approach. Originally mostly applied to understanding phonological processes and phonotactics, distributional methods were also applied to work on lexical semantics and provide the basis for the distributional hypothesis for meaning. Current computational approaches to learn the semantics of words from text in the form of word embeddings using machine learning are based on distributional theory.
