I didn't intend to bash computational linguistics. Those were some of my favorite course I wouldn't have attended more than I needed if I didn't like the topic and gotten something out of it.
It's surprising how often you can get very far with imperfect solutions. ELIZA is the classic example. A simple program with very little code could convince people that they were talking to another human or at least machine with an understanding of their feelings.
ELIZA was coded completely by humans. Of course, nowadays we have more sophisticated ways of doing that. We can throw a few topic tagged example sentences with connected replies at a computer and it will mostly reply with the right answers to similar sentences. This is only possible because computational linguistics provided the foundation for that.
Still many solution are hacky to this day but that is because computational linguistics is more concerned about interaction with imperfect humans than most of the other disciplines in computer science.
It's surprising how often you can get very far with imperfect solutions. ELIZA is the classic example. A simple program with very little code could convince people that they were talking to another human or at least machine with an understanding of their feelings.
ELIZA was coded completely by humans. Of course, nowadays we have more sophisticated ways of doing that. We can throw a few topic tagged example sentences with connected replies at a computer and it will mostly reply with the right answers to similar sentences. This is only possible because computational linguistics provided the foundation for that.
Still many solution are hacky to this day but that is because computational linguistics is more concerned about interaction with imperfect humans than most of the other disciplines in computer science.