How relevant is linguistics to computational linguistics?

Abstract

I start by explaining what I take computational linguistics to be, and discuss the relationship between its scientific side and its engineering applications. Statistical techniques have revolutionised many scientific fields in the past two decades, including computational linguistics. I describe the evolution of my own research in statistical parsing and how that lead me away from focusing on the details of any specific linguistic theory, and to concentrate instead on discovering which types of information (i.e., features) are important for specific linguistic processes, rather than on the details of exactly how this information should be formalised. I end by describing some of the ways that ideas from computational linguistics, statistics and machine learning may have an impact on linguistics in the future.