Has Computational Linguistics Become More Applied?

Where the field has been and where it is going? It is relatively easy to know where we have been, but harder (and more valuable) to know where we are going. The title of this paper, borrowed from Hull, Jurafsky and Martin (2008), suggests that applications have become more important, and that industrial laboratories will become increasingly prestigious. 1 Rise of Statistical Methods Some trends are pretty well established. The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is clearly accepting more statistical papers than it used to. Both Bob Moore (personal communication) and Fred Jelinek (personal communication) performed independent surveys and found a dramatic increase in statistical papers over the last couple decades [7]. 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 ACL Meeting %Statistical Papers Bob Moore Fred Jelinek

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CICLING
• Authors: Kenneth Ward Church
• Keywords: Bob Moore, CICLING 2009, Moore Fred Jelinek, Natural Language Processing, Statistical Papers