Four ACL Fellows recognized for 2016

We are delighted to announce that four members have been elected as ACL Fellows this year, to recognize their enduring and outstanding contributions to the field of computational linguistics. Let’s congratulate the 2016 Fellows for their achievements! They are (in alphabetical order): Bonnie J. Dorr, Marilyn Walker, Haifeng Wang and Ralph Weischedel.

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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: