Linguistic Challenges for Computationalists

Even now techniques are in common use in computational linguistics which could lead to important advances in pure linguistics, especially language acquisition and the study of language variation, if they were applied with intelligence and persistence. Reliable techniques for assaying similarities and differences among linguistic varieties are useful not only in dialectology and sociolinguistics, but could also be valuable in studies of first and second language learning and in the study of language contact. These techniques would be even more valuable if they indicated relative degrees of similarity, but also the source of deviation (contamination). Given the current tendency in linguistics to wish to confront the data of language use more directly, techniques are needed which can handle large amounts of noisy data and extract reliable measures from them. The current focus in Computational Linguistics on useful applications is a very good thing, but some further attention to the linguistic use of computational techniques would be very rewarding.