Since early 1990s, with the advancement of machine learning methods and the availability of data resources such as treebanks and parallel corpora, data-driven approaches to Natural Language Processing (NLP) have made significant progress. The success of such data-driven approaches has cast doubt on the relevance of linguistics to NLP. Conversely, NLP techniques are rarely used to help linguistics studies. The goal of this NSF-sponsored workshop is to carefully examine the relationship between linguistics and NLP and determine how incorporating linguistic knowledge into NLP systems can advance the state of the art of NLP and how NLP can assist linguistic studies through automatic collection and analysis of linguistic data.
The workshop will bring together researchers from linguistics and NLP with diverse interests in and across both disciplines. The workshop is held in conjunction with ACL on July 16, 2010 in Sweden. This award provides financial support that allows the workshop to attract top researchers in the US to attend the workshop in Sweden, and the support is crucial especially for linguists who normally do not attend ACL.
This workshop is intended to begin collaboration between linguists and NLP researchers that will continue long after the workshop has finished. The ultimate goals of the workshop and follow-up events are to accelerate work in NLP by bringing in important knowledge and information from linguistics, and to open the eyes of NLP researchers to the challenges within the field of linguistics that could benefit from cutting-edge, state-of-the-art NLP. The cross pollination between the disciplines can only push both forward and in directions that otherwise would come much later or not at all.
Since early 1990s, with the advancement of machine learning and the availability of data resources such as treebanks and parallel corpora, data-driven approaches to Natural Language Processing (NLP) have made significant progress. The success of such data-driven approaches has cast doubt on the relevance of linguistics to NLP. Conversely, NLP techniques are rarely used to help linguistics studies. A crucial challenge to both fields is to determine how incorporating linguistic knowledge into NLP systems can advance the state of the art of NLP and how NLP can assist linguistic studies through automatic collection and analysis of linguistic data. The goal of this grant is to bring linguists and NLP researchers together to address this challenge. To start the discussion, we organized a workshop titled "NLP and Linguistics: Finding the Common Ground" (http://faculty.washington.edu/fxia/nlpling2010/), which was held in conjunction with the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) on July 16, 2010 in Uppsala, Sweden. While ACL is the most prestigious conferences in NLP, linguists rarely attend the conference due to different focuses of the two fields. The workshop offered a rare opportunity to bring together top researchers from both fields. The workshop included an invited talk, three paper presentation sessions, two panel sessions, and one group discussion session. The workshop was well-received by both communities, and the workshop proceedings have been included in the ACL Anthology (http://aclweb.org/anthology/W/W10/#2100). This workshop was intended to begin collaboration between linguists and NLP researchers that would continue long after the workshop had finished. The ultimate goals of the workshop and follow-up events are to accelerate work in NLP by bringing in important knowledge and information from linguistics, and to open the eyes of NLP researchers to the challenges within the field of linguistics that could benefit from cutting-edge, state-of-the-art NLP. The cross-pollination between the disciplines will push both forward and in directions that otherwise would come much later or not at all. More broadly, linguistics is a discipline in social sciences/humanities, whereas NLP is a subfield of computer science, a discipline in science and engineering. The success of this workshop and on-going collaboration between linguistics and NLP can serve as an exemplar for other disciplines that are traditionally unrelated but could benefit greatly from such collaboration.
