"Thoughts on the future of (computational) linguistics"
Research methods in linguistics, as in other fields, are increasingly computational. But over the decades, the relevant fashions have changed again and again, with major shifts in motivations, methods and applications. When digital computers first appeared, linguistic analysis adopted the new methods of information theory, which accorded well with the ideas that dominated psychology and philosophy. Then came formal language theory and the idea of AI as applied logic, in sync with the development of cognitive science. That was followed by a revival of 1950s-style empiricism—AI as applied statistics—which in turn was followed by the age of deep nets and large language models. There are signs that the climate is changing again.
