Here are a few more remarks, which I think are mostly what I heard at @psresnik’s talk, but might be partly what I wanted to hear. 😉
Computational Linguistics is part of AI. Indeed, in the age of LLMs, it has become the tentpole part of AI. (Exciting!) But computational linguistics is also part of linguistics. ACL has to maintain its identity as people who are interested in human language and languages. At the moment, you see that interest most clearly in the many and varied workshops at ACL. You don’t always see it clearly wandering the main conference poster hall, where ACL can look a bit like yet another ML conference.
ACL (and, really, most academic conferences) has always been a balance between multiple interests and groups: cognitive science vs. natural language engineering, theoretical models vs. empiricism, research vs. practical systems. This diversity is important. It is always the case that the pendulum of interests has swung markedly over time, including around 1990, when Philip (and I) got into the field, with the rise of empirical approaches.
But, still, there are plenty of worries at the moment: You can worry that things have swung so far in one direction that the pendulum is broken. You can worry that the opportunities for research in industry are rapidly disappearing as industry research labs retreat from open science (Chris: much more a thing in the US than China!). You can definitely worry that the growing size of recent conferences might lead to a success catastrophe.
On the one hand, we should be preparing interested students for the rich opportunities now available in industry for natural language engineering. But on the other hand, we should also be reinvigorating interest in computational linguistic science. This has to be less about some of the problems that centrally animated ACL for most of the past 75 years (machine translation, syntactic parsing, …) and more about still little understood problems (e.g., computational approaches to language acquisition, pragmatics, discourse, sociolinguistics, and linguistic style).
Philip’s talk was more about questions than answers, but he encouraged everyone to spend a bit more time thinking about possible futures. ∎
