Vale Lauri Karttunen

It is with great sadness that I share the news of Lauri Karttunen's untimely passing. A
recipient of the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award (2007) and a founding ACL Fellow, Lauri
was a famously understated but extremely influential figure in computational linguistics.
He made foundational contributions to diverse areas including discourse referents,
presupposition plugs/holes/filters, implicative verbs, finite state methods, computational
morphophonology, and natural language inference.

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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: