Martha Evens Receives the 2022 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award


We are delighted to award the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award to Martha Evens, Professor Emeritus at Illinois Institute of Technology in Computer Science and a long-time member of ACL, for being a path blazer in a multitude of ways. First as an outstanding professor and mentor in Computer Science, with over 300 publications and over 100 PhD students, and for her pioneering research contributions in lexical databases and intelligent tutoring systems for medical students. Professor Evens received a BS in Mathematics from Bryn Mawr, summa cum laude, in 1955, an MS in Mathematics from Radcliffe in 1957, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Northwestern in 1975.

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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: