The Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the main professional association focused on computational linguistics, and their website references journals, conferences, and other useful resources and areas of activity. Some related interests are shared by the three chapters of the International Association for Machine Translation: the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA), the Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation (APAMT), and the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT). The Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and the Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) of the European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH) bridge computational linguistics and the broader field of digital humanities. Lastly, the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society that was founded in 1924 to promote the scientific study of language.
Much research in computational linguistics is conference-driven, and most proceedings and papers are indexed in the ACL Anthology. Some important conferences in the field include:
This guide provides an introduction and overview of selected library and information resources on computational linguistics that are available at Purdue. For more information on the broader topic of linguistics, see the Linguistics LibGuide.
The Association for Computational Linguistics defines computational linguistics as "the scientific study of language from a computational perspective. Computational linguists are interested in providing computational models of various kinds of linguistic phenomena. These models may be "knowledge-based" ("hand-crafted") or "data-driven" ("statistical" or "empirical"). Work in computational linguistics is in some cases motivated from a scientific perspective in that one is trying to provide a computational explanation for a particular linguistic or psycholinguistic phenomenon; and in other cases the motivation may be more purely technological in that one wants to provide a working component of a speech or natural language system. Indeed, the work of computational linguists is incorporated into many working systems today, including speech recognition systems, text-to-speech synthesizers, automated voice response systems, web search engines, text editors, language instruction materials, to name just a few."
Most print collections (books) on computational linguistics can be found on the 2nd floor of the Humanities, Social Science, and Education Library in Stewart Center, cataloged in the 410s (Dewey Decimal Classification).
Contact me if you can't find what you need for your research, learning, or teaching in the area of computational linguistics. If we don't have what you need in our holdings, you can request a copy using Interlibrary Loan, or if it's something you think we should have in our collection, please suggest that we purchase it.