The 51st Annual Meeting of the ACL in 2013 will be held in Sofia, Bulgaria. Svetla Koeva (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) will be local chair and Hinrich Schuetze (University of Stuttgart) general chair. Pascale Fung (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) and Massimo Poesio (University of Essex) have agreed to serve as program cochairs.
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: