Martha Palmer Receives the 2023 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award

We are delighted to award the 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award to Martha Palmer, Arts and Sciences Professor of Distinction for Linguistics and former Helen & Hubert Croft Professor of Engineering in the Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has made tremendous contributions to NLP, multilingual resources, and supervised ML in lexical-semantic processing. Her work in computational semantics has been hugely influential in the field, both through the semantic representations that she has developed and through the annotated resources that she has created.

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What is computational linguistics?

Computational linguistics is the scientific study of language from a computational perspective. Computational linguists are interested in providing computational models of various kinds of linguistic phenomena. These models may be "knowledge-based" ("hand-crafted") or "data-driven" ("statistical" or "empirical"). Work in computational linguistics is in some cases motivated from a scientific perspective in that one is trying to provide a computational explanation for a particular linguistic or psycholinguistic phenomenon; and in other cases the motivation may be more purely technological in that one wants to provide a working component of a speech or natural language system. Indeed, the work of computational linguists is incorporated into many working systems today, including speech recognition systems, text-to-speech synthesizers, automated voice response systems, web search engines, text editors, language instruction materials, to name just a few.

Popular computational linguistics textbooks include: