Steven Abney
The University of Michigan
Despite the name, computational linguistics (CL) has a closer affinity with computer science than with linguistics, The relevance of CL to linguistics has sometimes been doubted, on the grounds that CL is more engineering than science; and despite recent rapprochement, the place of CL within linguistics departments remains unsettled. CL has indeed focused heavily on technology, but it has also brought mathematical sophistication and new perspectives to the study of language, creating opportunities for progress on fundamental linguistic questions. From a CL perspective, the first obvious step for research into universal grammar is the construction of a universal corpus, and I propose a community effort to do just that. I describe semisupervised learning techniques that can be used to construct and exploit such a corpus.
MCLC 5