What Computational Linguists Can Learn from Psychologists (and Vice Versa)

摘要

Predicting the future is a tricky thing. No major breakthrough came for speech technology—I am still typing this. However, language technology did change almost beyond recognition. Perhaps one of the main reasons for this has been the explosive growth of the Internet, which helped language technology in two different ways. On the one hand it instigated the development and refinement of techniques needed for searching in document collections of unprecedented size, on the other it resulted in a large increase of freely available text data. Recently, language technology has been par- ticularly successful for tasks where huge amounts of textual data is available to which statistical machine learning techniques can be applied (Halevy, Norvig, and Pereira 2009). As a result of these developments, mainstream computational linguistics is now a successful, application-oriented discipline which is particularly good at extracting information from sequences of words.