Introduction to the special issue on corpus and computational linguistics, philology, and the linguistic heritage of humanity

The articles in this issue make two complementary assertions: first, language and linguistic sources are a key element of human cultural heritage and, second, we need to integrate the ancient goals of philology with rapidly emerging methods from fields such as Corpus and Computational Linguistics. The first 15,000,000 volumes digitized by Google contained data from more than 400 languages covering more than four thousand years of the human record. We need to develop methods to explore linguistic changes and the ideas that languages encode as these evolve and circulate over millennia and on a global scale. © 2011 ACM.