Remembering Makoto Nagao

May 26, 2021 | BY webmaster

It is with deep sadness that we share the news of Prof. Makoto Nagao’s passing on May 23, 2021. A recipient of the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award (2003), Prof. Nagao was one of the pioneers of computational linguistics. He made significant contributions to several major research topics, including machine translation, corpus-based linguistics, electronic dictionaries, and digital libraries. He also endeavored the establishment of the International Association for Machine Translation, and became the organization's first president. Prof.

Pages

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:

User login