Computational Linguistics: What is it, and how can it be used in Digital Humanities?"

Sandra Kubler and Markus Dickinson

Department of Linguistics

"In this talk, we will give an overview of what Computational Linguistics (CL) is and what we work on here in the CL program at IU. One of the main goals of CL is giving the computer the capability of understanding text. This understanding is different from the human process and restricted to specific tasks. We will give examples of our research at IU that can be applicable in text-based research in Digital Humanities, focusing on annotating learner language, syntactic analysis, and the resolution pronouns and noun phrases. Although our work focuses on assigning structure and meaning to data (e.g., finding subjects, identifying what a pronoun refers to), there seem to be unique challenges in working within the humanities, such as non-canonical language usage, figurative language, and accounting for meta-data."