One of the highlights of COLING/ACL 2006 was the presentation of the 2006 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award to: Eva Hajicova
The following is an excerpt from the introduction made by Jun'ichi Tsujii (president of the ACL) at the COLING/ACL 2006 award ceremony.
I first met Eva, 26 years ago, at Coling in Tokyo, 1980.
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: