The "Field"

• "Computational linguistics", "natural language processing"
  • Conferences: ACL, COLING (every other year)
  • Journal: Computational Linguistics
  • Early focus on translation, later mainly analysis; recent interest in generation and translation again
  • Originally strongly influenced by linguistic theories and symbolic AI
  • Today two strands: computational linguistics proper and statistical approaches

• Connectionist approaches to linguistic behavior
  • Conferences: Cognitive Science Society, NIPS
  • Journals: Cognitive Science, Connection Science
  • Relatively uninfluenced by linguistic theories, except cognitive grammar to some extent
  • Relatively uninfluenced by conventional NLP theories, except in terms of complexity arguments
  • Influence of psychology, neuroscience, dynamical systems theory

[L645 Syllabus]