Revolution in computational linguistics: Towards a genuinely applied science

Among people working in Computational Linguistics (CL) around 1990 and still active in the field now, there is a widely shared feeling that they have witnessed a revolution. This paper shows which developments are responsible for this perception and which elements are central in the actual revolution. In order to avoid terminological confusion, the concept of revolution as it is used here is clarified first. Then the development in the subfield of Machine Translation is studied in some detail. It is argued that the actual revolution consists in a shift of attention from the application of theoretical knowledge to the solution of practical problems. To the extent that this shift is representative of more general developments in the field. the conclusions can be generalized to CL as a whole. Among people working in Computational Linguistics (CL) around 1990 and still active in the field now, there is a widely shared feeling that they have witnessed a revolution. The purpose of this paper is to show which developments are responsible for this perceived revolution and how the consequences of these developments for the field can be evaluated. Section I creates a basis by establishing which sense of revolution is meant in the title and how such a phenomenon can be recognized in general. The position of Machine Translation (MT) in CL and the general orientation of CL before the revolution are sketched in section 2. Some aspects of four NIT systems representative of the development in the 1980s and 1990s are outlined in section 3 and analysed in section 4. From this analysis, a more general characterization of the revolution in CL is derived in section 5.