During its 59th annual meeting, the Association for Computational Linguistics awarded its 2021 Distinguished Service Award to Professor Lillian Lee.
Lillian Lee is a professor of computer science and of information science at Cornell University. She received her undergraduate degree at Cornell in math and computer science and her Ph.D. in computer science at Harvard in 1997.
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.
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