New TACL Co-Editor-in-Chief selected for 2024-2026

Dilek Hakkani Tur, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has been selected as the new co-Editor-in-Chief of the ACL journal Transaction of the ACL for the staged three year term 2024-2026. She joins Asli Celikyilmaz (Meta) and Roi Reichart (Technion) to work together at the TACL helm. The ACL Exec and the TACL Steering Committee are happy to welcome her on board, and wish her all the best in this very important role for the ACL community!

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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: