Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing

Researches in Computational Linguistics (CL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) have been increasingly dissociated from each other. Empirical techniques in NLP show good performances in some tasks when large amount of data (with annotation) are available. However, in order for these techniques to be adapted easily to new text types or domains, or for similar techniques to be applied to more complex tasks such as text entailment than POS taggers, parsers, etc., rational understanding of language is required. Engineering techniques have to be underpinned by scientific understanding. In this paper, taking grammar in CL and parsing in NLP as an example, we will discuss how to re-integrate these two research disciplines. Research results of our group on parsing are presented to show how grammar in CL is used as the backbone of a parser.