In Memoriam: Susan Armstrong

Susan Armstrong
Susan Armstrong
20.6.1952­ - 1.9.2015

 

It is with great sadness that we report the recent death of Susan Armstrong, who worked as Professor of translation technology at the University of Geneva until her retirement in 2014. She served as secretary to the European Chapter of the ACL from 1993­-2000, remaining on the Chapter’s nominating committee until 2004. She had a fundamental role in the founding and successful development of SIGDAT.

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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: