(Invited talk) Computational Linguistics for Studying Language in People: Principles, Applications and Research Problems

One of the goals of computational linguistics is to create automated systems that can learn, generate, and understand language at all levels of structure (semantics, syntax, morphology, phonology, phonetics). This is a very demanding task whose complete fulfillment lies far in the future. Human beings can learn, generate, and understand language at all levels of structure, and the study of how they do it can be pursued by computational modeling. Indeed, one sort of “acid test” for theories in linguistics is whether they can serve as the basis for successful models of this kind. A research strategy for theoretical linguistics based on modeling thus invites close collaboration between “mainstream” linguists and their computational colleagues.