Data-Intensive Experimental Linguistics

Abstract

Computational linguistics is not a specialization of linguistics at all; it is a branch of computer science. A large majority of computational linguists have degrees in computer science and positions in computer science departments. It was founded as an offshoot of an engineering discipline (machine translation), and has been subsequently shaped by its place within artificial intelligence, and by a heavy influx of theory and method from speech recognition (another engineering discipline) and machine learning.

But computation is a means to an end; the essential feature is data collection, analysis, and prediction on the large scale. I will call it data-intensive experimental linguistics.

I wish to explain how data-intensive linguistics differs from mainstream practice, why I consider it to be genuine linguistics, and why I believe that it enables fundamental advances in our understanding of language.