Bill Woods receives the 2010 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award

Speech given by ACL President Ido Dagan:

One perspective through which Bill Woods looks at himself is as a "problem solver". But this definition is not specific enough, because there are two ways to solve problems: one is to figure out what the solution for the problem is, while the other is to actually build something that solves it. Bill is definitely an outstanding representative of the latter approach.

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What is computational linguistics?

Computational linguistics is the scientific study of language from a computational perspective. Computational linguists are interested in providing computational models of various kinds of linguistic phenomena. These models may be "knowledge-based" ("hand-crafted") or "data-driven" ("statistical" or "empirical"). Work in computational linguistics is in some cases motivated from a scientific perspective in that one is trying to provide a computational explanation for a particular linguistic or psycholinguistic phenomenon; and in other cases the motivation may be more purely technological in that one wants to provide a working component of a speech or natural language system. Indeed, the work of computational linguists is incorporated into many working systems today, including speech recognition systems, text-to-speech synthesizers, automated voice response systems, web search engines, text editors, language instruction materials, to name just a few.

Popular computational linguistics textbooks include: