Computational Linguistics : What About the Linguistics ? ∗ Karen

Three times a year I get my copy of a wholly respectable mainstream linguistics journal. Its scholarly articles are rich in examples from varied languages, and alongside these detailed analyses it advances theoretical claims and counterclaims. Its many reviews point to much more of the same. But this journal content is of interest here for another reason than these scholarly ones. First, references to computing are conspicuous by their absence. Just occasionally, grammar types or semantic models appear that have computational connections, for example in a shared view of feature sets; and there are references to computational corpus analysis, though more often in reviews than in major articles. Very very occasionally, there are articles that are more manifestly computational ones, for instance in applying unification to syntactic structures. But in general, the notion that computation in a serious sense, not just as some highly abstract grounding or, maybe, politically correct meta-reference, has something important to say to linguistics never figures. Does this matter? Specifically, whether it matters to the linguists or not, does it matter to us (computational types)? In a world of proliferating specialist journals and, increasingly, conference proceedings, why worry about the lack of computational reference in mainstream linguistics journals? Being computational is not the only way of being legitimate in any field, but there are plenty of publishing venues for the computational. So it need not be a criticism of a linguistics journal like the one I get that it does not have more on computational linguistics, or natural language processing, or natural language engineering, or human language technology. We may find the lack of computational reference a surprise, but even if there are a lot of non-computational linguists out there (as there indubitably are), why should this be a problem? The linguists may argue they have things we ought to learn from them, and it’s up to us to bridge the gap. We may argue just the reverse. But in my view there is a deeper problem. This has to do with the fact that as far as I can tell, the journal I have referred to, and other linguistics journals, are dominated by some Chomskyan paradigm. But does it matter that the linguistic zeitgeist is Chomskyan? Further, does it matter precisely which Chomskyan paradigm: older or newer, broader or more specific, pure or modified?