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.
The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:
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.
Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are considered as psychologically real, and research in cognitive linguistics aims to help understand cognition in general and is seen as a road into the human mind.
The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language processing research, along with EMNLP. The conference is held each summer in locations where significant computational linguistics research is carried out.
Computational semantics is the study of how to automate the process of constructing and reasoning with meaning representations of natural language expressions. It consequently plays an important role in natural-language processing and computational linguistics.
Computational mathematics is an area of mathematics devoted to the interaction between mathematics and computer computation.
Geoffrey Sampson is Professor of Natural Language Computing in the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex. He produces annotation standards for compiling corpora (databases) of ordinary usage of the English language. His work has been applied in automatic language-understanding software, and in writing-skills training. He has also analysed Ronald Coase's "theory of the firm" and the economic and political implications of e-business.
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It entails the comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language — cognitive, social, environmental, biological as well as structural.
Jennifer Sandra Cole is a professor of linguistics and Director of the Prosody and Speech Dynamics Lab at Northwestern University. Her research uses experimental and computational methods to study the sound structure of language. She was the founding General Editor of Laboratory Phonology (2009–2015) and a founding member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.
Language and Linguistics Compass is an online peer-reviewed linguistics journal established by Blackwell Publishers in 2006. One of eight Compass journals, Language and Linguistics Compass publishes state-of-the-art review articles aimed at an international readership. The target audience includes academic researchers, postgraduates students and advanced undergraduates. The editors-in-chief are Edwin Battistella and Natalie Schilling.
Language Log is a collaborative language blog maintained by Mark Liberman, a phonetician at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dragomir R. Radev was an American computer scientist who was a professor at Yale University, working on natural language processing and information retrieval. He also served as a University of Michigan computer science professor and Columbia University computer science adjunct professor, as well as a Member of the Advisory Board of Lawyaw.
Textual entailment (TE), also known as Natural Language Inference (NLI), in natural language processing is a directional relation between text fragments. The relation holds whenever the truth of one text fragment follows from another text. In the TE framework, the entailing and entailed texts are termed text (t) and hypothesis (h), respectively. Textual entailment is not the same as pure logical entailment – it has a more relaxed definition: "t entails h" (t ⇒ h) if, typically, a human reading t would infer that h is most likely true. (Alternatively: t ⇒ h if and only if, typically, a human reading t would be justified in inferring the proposition expressed by h from the proposition expressed by t.) The relation is directional because even if "t entails h", the reverse "h entails t" is much less certain.
Barbara J. Grosz CorrFRSE is an American computer scientist and Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences at Harvard University. She has made seminal contributions to the fields of natural language processing and multi-agent systems. With Alison Simmons, she is co-founder of the Embedded EthiCS programme at Harvard, which embeds ethics lessons into computer science courses.
John A. Nerbonne is an American computational linguist. He was a professor of humanities computing at the University of Groningen until January 2017, when he gave his valedictory address at the celebration of the 30th anniversary of his department there.
Natural Language Engineering is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Cambridge University Press which covers research and software in natural language processing. Its aim is to "bridge the gap between traditional computational linguistics research and the implementation of practical applications with potential real-world use". Other than original publication on theoretical and applied aspects of computational linguistics, the journal also contains Industry Watch and Emerging Trends columns tracking developments in the field. The editor-in-chief is Ruslan Mitkov from University of Wolverhampton. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2016 impact factor of 1.065.
Lillian Lee is a computer scientist whose research involves natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and computational social science. She is a professor of computer science and information science at Cornell University, and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) is a family of masked-language models introduced in 2018 by researchers at Google. A 2020 literature survey concluded that "in a little over a year, BERT has become a ubiquitous baseline in Natural Language Processing (NLP) experiments counting over 150 research publications analyzing and improving the model."
Alice Geraldine Baltina ter Meulen is a Dutch linguist, logician, and philosopher of language whose research topics include genericity in linguistics, intensional logic, generalized quantifiers, discourse representation theory, and the linguistic representation of time. She is a professor emerita at the University of Geneva.
