The Future of Computational Linguistics: on Beyond Alchemy
REVIEW published: 19 April 2021 doi: 10.3389/frai.2021.625341 The Future of Computational Linguistics: On Beyond Alchemy Kenneth Church 1* and Mark Liberman 2 1Baidu Research, Sunnyvale, CA, United States, 2University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States Over the decades, fashions in Computational Linguistics have changed again and again, with major shifts in motivations, methods and applications. When digital computers first appeared, linguistic analysis adopted the new methods of information theory, which accorded well with the ideas that dominated psychology and philosophy. Then came formal language theory and the idea of AI as applied logic, in sync with the development of cognitive science. That was followed by a revival of 1950s-style empiricism—AI as applied statistics—which in turn was followed by the age of deep nets. There are signs that the climate is changing again, and we offer some thoughts about paths forward, especially for younger researchers who will soon be the leaders. Keywords: empiricism, rationalism, deep nets, logic, probability, connectionism, computational linguistics, alchemy Edited by: 1 INTRODUCTION: BETTER TOGETHER Sergei Nirenburg, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, We are going to speculate about the future of Computational Linguistics (CL)—how things may United States change, how we think things should change, and our view of the forces that will determine what Reviewed by: actually happens. Given that different people have different views of what the field is, and even what Yorick Wilks, it should be called, we will define the field of Computational Linguistics by what is discussed in top Florida Institute for Human and venues, using Google Scholar’s ranking of venues.1 The name of one of these venues, the Association Machine Cognition, United States Tony Veale, for Computational Linguistics (ACL), was controversial in the 1960s.
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