Remembering Richard Kittredge

April 21, 2019 | BY webmaster

Richard Kittredge passed away in early April, 2019. Richard had been a long-standing member of the ACL community. He obtained his PhD in 1969 at the University of Pennsylvania with Zellig Harris and Henry Hiz, working on tense and aspect. He subsequently became a professor at the Université de Montréal, where he spent his entire academic career. In the 1970s, Richard became a member of the TAUM research group on machine translation. The TAUM effort enabled one of the first commercial applications of machine translation, the METEO system in Canada.

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