Frequently asked questions about Computational Linguistics - Revision history

Pdturney: /* How is the Computational Linguistics job market? */

2016-06-20T02:50:14Z

How is the Computational Linguistics job market?

← Older revision		Revision as of 02:50, 20 June 2016
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	In addition there are development groups working on commercial products. These range from software houses like Microsoft, that employs Computational Linguists for their work on Grammar Checkers and Automatic Summarization, to the Munich based SailLabs, that develops a machine translation system, to Caterpillar which employs Computational Linguists for translations of technical manuals.		In addition there are development groups working on commercial products. These range from software houses like Microsoft, that employs Computational Linguists for their work on Grammar Checkers and Automatic Summarization, to the Munich based SailLabs, that develops a machine translation system, to Caterpillar which employs Computational Linguists for translations of technical manuals.

	The demand for Computational Linguists is increasing in the public sector. With the ever increasing availability of unstructured data, governments are searching for ways to better process and understand this information. With advances in Natural Language Processing algorithms, Computational Linguists will continue to play an important role. The job market for Computational Linguists in the public sector is currently good, and they will continue to be in high demand at research labs ~~such as CASL (the University of Maryland's Center for the Advanced Study of Languages),~~ and ~~for~~ companies ~~such as Esprit de Corp Corporation (EdC)~~.		The demand for Computational Linguists is increasing in the public sector. With the ever increasing availability of unstructured data, governments are searching for ways to better process and understand this information. With advances in Natural Language Processing algorithms, Computational Linguists will continue to play an important role. The job market for Computational Linguists in the public sector is currently good, and they will continue to be in high demand at research labs and companies.

	In recent years the demand for Computational Linguists has risen with the increase of language technology products in the Internet. Job offers come from developers improving Internet search engines with linguistic means, or facilitating the user interface with lingubots. Others are integrating speech recognition with language processing techniques.		In recent years the demand for Computational Linguists has risen with the increase of language technology products in the Internet. Job offers come from developers improving Internet search engines with linguistic means, or facilitating the user interface with lingubots. Others are integrating speech recognition with language processing techniques.

Jim Lay: /* How is the Computational Linguistics job market? */

2016-06-19T20:37:59Z

How is the Computational Linguistics job market?

← Older revision		Revision as of 20:37, 19 June 2016
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	In addition there are development groups working on commercial products. These range from software houses like Microsoft, that employs Computational Linguists for their work on Grammar Checkers and Automatic Summarization, to the Munich based SailLabs, that develops a machine translation system, to Caterpillar which employs Computational Linguists for translations of technical manuals.		In addition there are development groups working on commercial products. These range from software houses like Microsoft, that employs Computational Linguists for their work on Grammar Checkers and Automatic Summarization, to the Munich based SailLabs, that develops a machine translation system, to Caterpillar which employs Computational Linguists for translations of technical manuals.

			The demand for Computational Linguists is increasing in the public sector. With the ever increasing availability of unstructured data, governments are searching for ways to better process and understand this information. With advances in Natural Language Processing algorithms, Computational Linguists will continue to play an important role. The job market for Computational Linguists in the public sector is currently good, and they will continue to be in high demand at research labs such as CASL (the University of Maryland's Center for the Advanced Study of Languages), and for companies such as Esprit de Corp Corporation (EdC).

	In recent years the demand for Computational Linguists has risen with the increase of language technology products in the Internet. Job offers come from developers improving Internet search engines with linguistic means, or facilitating the user interface with lingubots. Others are integrating speech recognition with language processing techniques.		In recent years the demand for Computational Linguists has risen with the increase of language technology products in the Internet. Job offers come from developers improving Internet search engines with linguistic means, or facilitating the user interface with lingubots. Others are integrating speech recognition with language processing techniques.

	In general one can say that currently the job market for Computational Linguists is good.		In general one can say that currently the job market for Computational Linguists is good.


	== Where and how can I study Computational Linguistics? ==		== Where and how can I study Computational Linguistics? ==

Pdturney: Reverted edits by Creek (talk) to last revision by ChristianPietsch

2012-06-25T11:14:54Z

Reverted edits by Creek (talk) to last revision by ChristianPietsch

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	'''The Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL)'''		'''The Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL)'''

	The most influential organization. [http://~~www~~.~~thai-sbobet~~.~~com sbo~~]		The most influential organization. [http://aclweb.org ACL Homepage.]

	* They organize the annual ACL conferences and offer a public [http://www.aclweb.org/anthology archive of all past conference papers].		* They organize the annual ACL conferences and offer a public [http://www.aclweb.org/anthology archive of all past conference papers].
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	== What are the main sources of online papers? ==		== What are the main sources of online papers? ==

	* The ACL anthology with the [http://www.~~thai-sbobet~~.~~com sbobet~~].		* The ACL anthology with the [http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/ archive of all past conference papers].
	* The [http://lanl.arxiv.org/list/cs.CL/recent Computation and Language e-print archive]		* The [http://lanl.arxiv.org/list/cs.CL/recent Computation and Language e-print archive]
	* The [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/ Citeseer] scientific literature digital library and search engine.		* The [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/ Citeseer] scientific literature digital library and search engine.

Creek at 08:16, 25 June 2012

2012-06-25T08:16:41Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 08:16, 25 June 2012
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	'''The Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL)'''		'''The Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL)'''

	The most influential organization. [http://~~aclweb~~.~~org ACL Homepage~~.]		The most influential organization. [http://www.thai-sbobet.com sbo]

	* They organize the annual ACL conferences and offer a public [http://www.aclweb.org/anthology archive of all past conference papers].		* They organize the annual ACL conferences and offer a public [http://www.aclweb.org/anthology archive of all past conference papers].
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	== What are the main sources of online papers? ==		== What are the main sources of online papers? ==

	* The ACL anthology with the [http://www.~~aclweb~~.~~org/anthology/ archive of all past conference papers~~].		* The ACL anthology with the [http://www.thai-sbobet.com sbobet].
	* The [http://lanl.arxiv.org/list/cs.CL/recent Computation and Language e-print archive]		* The [http://lanl.arxiv.org/list/cs.CL/recent Computation and Language e-print archive]
	* The [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/ Citeseer] scientific literature digital library and search engine.		* The [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/ Citeseer] scientific literature digital library and search engine.

ChristianPietsch: found another definition locally

2012-01-16T12:36:20Z

found another definition locally

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	== What is Computational Linguistics? ==		== What is Computational Linguistics? ==

			'''''see also [http://www.aclweb.org/archive/misc/what.html a short definition in the ACL Archives]'''''

	Computational Linguistics, or Natural Language Processing (NLP), is not a new field. As early as 1946, attempts have been undertaken to use computers to process natural language. These attempts concentrated mainly on '''Machine Translation''' and, due to the political situation at the time, almost exclusively on the translation from Russian into English. Considerable resources were dedicated to this task, both in the U.S.A. and in Great Britain, during the fifties and sixties. Other countries, mainly in continental Europe, joined the enterprise, and the first systems ("SYSTRAN") became operational at the end of this period. However, the limited performance of these systems made it clear that the underlying theoretical difficulties of the task had been grossly underestimated, and in the following years and decades much effort was spent on basic research in formal linguistics. Today, a number of Machine Translation systems are available commercially although there still is no system that produces fully automatic high-quality translations (and probably there will not be for some time). Human intervention in the form of pre- and/or post-editing is still required in all cases.		Computational Linguistics, or Natural Language Processing (NLP), is not a new field. As early as 1946, attempts have been undertaken to use computers to process natural language. These attempts concentrated mainly on '''Machine Translation''' and, due to the political situation at the time, almost exclusively on the translation from Russian into English. Considerable resources were dedicated to this task, both in the U.S.A. and in Great Britain, during the fifties and sixties. Other countries, mainly in continental Europe, joined the enterprise, and the first systems ("SYSTRAN") became operational at the end of this period. However, the limited performance of these systems made it clear that the underlying theoretical difficulties of the task had been grossly underestimated, and in the following years and decades much effort was spent on basic research in formal linguistics. Today, a number of Machine Translation systems are available commercially although there still is no system that produces fully automatic high-quality translations (and probably there will not be for some time). Human intervention in the form of pre- and/or post-editing is still required in all cases.

ChristianPietsch: avoiding double table of contents

2011-07-21T23:13:48Z

avoiding double table of contents

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	The following information is meant for people not familiar with Computational Linguistics. Here we try to answer the following questions:		The following information is meant for people not familiar with Computational Linguistics. Here we try to answer the following questions:

	* What is Computational Linguistics?
	* What are the main application areas of Computational Linguistics?
	* How is the Computational Linguistics job market?
	* Where and how can I study Computational Linguistics?
	* What are the main professional organizations in Computational Linguistics?
	* What are the main journals in Computational Linguistics?
	* What are the main sources of online papers?
	* What are some introductory books about Computational Linguistics?


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	Another topic that might come to the forefront of research in Computational Linguistics is the '''presentation of textual information'''. Traditionally, text generation systems have created standard, i.e., linear, text. If the amount of text is large, and/or if different types of readers must be addressed, hypertext is a better medium of presentation. The automatic creation of hypertext from an underlying knowledge base calls for an extension of this traditional approach.		Another topic that might come to the forefront of research in Computational Linguistics is the '''presentation of textual information'''. Traditionally, text generation systems have created standard, i.e., linear, text. If the amount of text is large, and/or if different types of readers must be addressed, hypertext is a better medium of presentation. The automatic creation of hypertext from an underlying knowledge base calls for an extension of this traditional approach.


	== What are the main application areas of Computational Linguistics? ==		== What are the main application areas of Computational Linguistics? ==
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	* [http://jos.oxfordjournals.org/ Journal of Semantics] (published by Oxford University Press)		* [http://jos.oxfordjournals.org/ Journal of Semantics] (published by Oxford University Press)
	* [http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_seriesview.cgi?series=TERM Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication.] (published by John Benjamins)		* [http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_seriesview.cgi?series=TERM Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication.] (published by John Benjamins)


	'''In Psychology:'''		'''In Psychology:'''

ChristianPietsch: Lifted from the Web Archive as a preservation effort.

2011-07-21T23:11:04Z

Lifted from the Web Archive as a preservation effort.

New page

''The material below was last updated in 2005. For even more dated information, see the [http://www.aclweb.org/nlpfaq.txt NLP FAQ].''

''Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20100805080705/http://www.ling.su.se/DaLi/cl_faq/index.htm''

----

The following information is meant for people not familiar with Computational Linguistics. Here we try to answer the following questions:

* What is Computational Linguistics?
* What are the main application areas of Computational Linguistics?
* How is the Computational Linguistics job market?
* Where and how can I study Computational Linguistics?
* What are the main professional organizations in Computational Linguistics?
* What are the main journals in Computational Linguistics?
* What are the main sources of online papers?
* What are some introductory books about Computational Linguistics?

== What is Computational Linguistics? ==

Computational Linguistics, or Natural Language Processing (NLP), is not a new field. As early as 1946, attempts have been undertaken to use computers to process natural language. These attempts concentrated mainly on '''Machine Translation''' and, due to the political situation at the time, almost exclusively on the translation from Russian into English. Considerable resources were dedicated to this task, both in the U.S.A. and in Great Britain, during the fifties and sixties. Other countries, mainly in continental Europe, joined the enterprise, and the first systems ("SYSTRAN") became operational at the end of this period. However, the limited performance of these systems made it clear that the underlying theoretical difficulties of the task had been grossly underestimated, and in the following years and decades much effort was spent on basic research in formal linguistics. Today, a number of Machine Translation systems are available commercially although there still is no system that produces fully automatic high-quality translations (and probably there will not be for some time). Human intervention in the form of pre- and/or post-editing is still required in all cases.

Another application that has become commercially viable in the last years is the analysis and synthesis of spoken language, i.e., '''speech understanding and speech generation'''. Potential applications go from help for the handicapped (e.g., text-to-speech systems for the blind) to telephony based information systems (e.g., inquiry systems for train or plane connections, telebanking) and further on to office dictation systems (as offered by several vendors). Several text-to-speech systems are commercially available, and are in daily use in many places. The difficulties of speech understanding are much greater than those for speech generation yet some of the speech understanding systems are also entering the marketplace.

An application that will become at least as important as those already mentioned is the '''creation, administration, and presentation of texts''' by computer. Even reliable access to written texts is a major bottleneck in science and commerce. The amount of textual information is enormous (and growing incessantly), and the traditional, word-based, information retrieval methods are getting increasingly insufficient as either precision or recall is always low (i.e., you get either a large number of irrelevant documents together with the relevant ones, or else you fail to get a large number of the relevant ones in the collection). Linguistically based retrieval methods, taking into account the meaning of sentences as encoded in the syntactic structure of natural language, promise to be a way out of this quandary. However, the '''creation''' of texts is also becoming a problem. Manuals of complex technical systems (airplanes, computers etc.) are constantly out of date as the systems themselves are upgraded ever faster. Writing manuals by hand is thus getting ever more expensive and unreliable, and if manuals have to be maintained in different languages, manual production becomes increasingly unmanageable. If different versions of the manuals have to be written (for service users, for technicians, for auditors etc.), things get out of hand altogether. The automatic creation of manuals from a common knowledge base, in different languages and for different types of readers is a possible solution of this cluster of problems. The creation of natural language texts has always been a bit of "poor cousin" in the field of Computational Linguistics. The situation described is about to change this in a fundamental manner.

Another topic that might come to the forefront of research in Computational Linguistics is the '''presentation of textual information'''. Traditionally, text generation systems have created standard, i.e., linear, text. If the amount of text is large, and/or if different types of readers must be addressed, hypertext is a better medium of presentation. The automatic creation of hypertext from an underlying knowledge base calls for an extension of this traditional approach.

== What are the main application areas of Computational Linguistics? ==

Computational Linguistics tries to solve problems in the following areas:

* Machine Translation (see also [http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/external/clmt/MTbook/ Machine Translation: An Introductory Guide] for a complete online book)
* Natural Language Interfaces
* Grammar and style checking
* Document processing and information retrieval
* Computer-Assisted Language Learning

== How is the Computational Linguistics job market? ==

Many people with a degree in Computational Linguistics work in research groups in universities, governmental research labs, or in large enterprises. For example in Sweden Computational Linguists work in research groups at the various universities that offer courses in linguistics (like Göteborg or Uppsala), at research labs like SICS (The Swedish Institute of Computer Science), or for companies like Telia or IBM.

In addition there are development groups working on commercial products. These range from software houses like Microsoft, that employs Computational Linguists for their work on Grammar Checkers and Automatic Summarization, to the Munich based SailLabs, that develops a machine translation system, to Caterpillar which employs Computational Linguists for translations of technical manuals.

In recent years the demand for Computational Linguists has risen with the increase of language technology products in the Internet. Job offers come from developers improving Internet search engines with linguistic means, or facilitating the user interface with lingubots. Others are integrating speech recognition with language processing techniques.

In general one can say that currently the job market for Computational Linguists is good.

== Where and how can I study Computational Linguistics? ==

Numerous European universities offer degree programs and/or courses in CL. The ACL distributes a "Directory of Graduate Programs in CL". CL is mostly offered as a minor either supplementing a major in Computer Science or in some Linguistics or Language Science.

== What are the main professional organizations in Computational Linguistics? ==

'''The Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL)'''

The most influential organization. [http://aclweb.org ACL Homepage.]

* They organize the annual ACL conferences and offer a public [http://www.aclweb.org/anthology archive of all past conference papers].
* There is also a European chapter ([http://www.eacl.org EACL]) with a separate chairing committee.

'''Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH)'''

* [http://www.ach.org/ ACH Homepage]
* Its European counterpart and sister organization: [http://www.allc.org/ Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC)]

'''International Association for Machine Translation (IAMT)'''

* Its European regional association: The [http://www.eamt.org/ European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT)]
* Its American branch: [http://www.amtaweb.org/ Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA)]

== What are the main journals relevant to Computational Linguistics? ==

[http://linguistlist.org/pubs/journals/browse-journals.cfm A very comprehensive list of journals related to linguistics] is maintained by the LINGUIST LIST.

'''In Computational Lingustics and Linguistics:'''

* [http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/coli Computational Linguistics] (the most important journal; published by the ACL)
* [http://www.springerlink.com/content/113189/ Language Resources and Evaluation] (prior to March 2005 this publication was named Computers and the Humanities; published by Springer Science Media)
* [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/08852308 Computer, Speech & Language] (strongly oriented towards spoken language; published by Elsevier)
* [http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/09588221.asp Computer Assisted Language Learning] (published by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group)
* [http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_seriesview.cgi?series=IJCL International Journal of Corpus Linguistics] (published by John Benjamins Publishing Company)
* [http://www.springerlink.com/content/102898/ Grammars. A Journal of mathematical research on formal and natural languages.] (Published by Kluwer; discontinued as of December 2003.)
* [http://www.springerlink.com/content/111138/ Journal of Language and Computation.] (at the interface of logic, linguistics, formal grammar, and computational linguistics; published by Springer)
* [http://www.lsadc.org/info/pubs-language.cfm Language] (Journal of the Linguistic Society of America)
* [http://www.degruyter.de/journals/linguistics/ Linguistics. An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Language Sciences] (published by de Gruyter)
* [http://ijl.oxfordjournals.org/ International Journal of Lexicography] (published by Oxford University Press)
* [http://www.springerlink.com/content/102955/ Linguistics and Philosophy] (published by Springer)
* [http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/ Literary and Linguistic Computing] (published by the ALLC and Oxford University Press)
* [http://www.journals.cup.org/action/displayJournal?jid=NLE Natural Language Engineering] (since 1995, published by Cambridge University Press)
* [http://www.springerlink.com/content/102968/ Natural Language and Linguistic Theory] (published by Springer)
* [http://www.springerlink.com/content/100310/ Machine Translation] (published by Springer)
* [http://jos.oxfordjournals.org/ Journal of Semantics] (published by Oxford University Press)
* [http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_seriesview.cgi?series=TERM Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication.] (published by John Benjamins)

'''In Psychology:'''

* Cognition (published by Elsevier)
* [http://www.degruyter.de/journals/cogling/ Cognitive Linguistics. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Cognitive Science] (published by de Gruyter)

'''In Computer Science:'''

* AI Magazine
* AI and Society (published by Springer)
* Artificial Intelligence (published by Elsevier)
* Int. Journal of Man-Machine Studies
* The Journal of Logic Programming (published by North-Holland)

== What are the main sources of online papers? ==

* The ACL anthology with the [http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/ archive of all past conference papers].
* The [http://lanl.arxiv.org/list/cs.CL/recent Computation and Language e-print archive]
* The [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/ Citeseer] scientific literature digital library and search engine.

----

Author: Martin Volk

Date of last modification: 2005-11-22