Answers.Body: <p>Yes. A computational linguist is someone who (among other things) uses computers to process/model/analyse/... natural language. Coding might be one aspect of it, but is about the least important: you can always get a non-linguist programmer to do coding for you.</p>
  
  <p>I studied "Computational Linguistics" at university, and while programming was taught as part of the course, coding was only a minor aspect in the actual subject matter. The senior professor (and head of the department) wasn't able to do any coding himself; he came from the linguistics side of it.</p>
  
  <p>Being able to program is useful, as it speeds things up and makes you more independent, but it is by no means an important part of being a computational linguist.</p>
  
  <p>UPDATE: I have been accused of misrepresenting the field of CL. However, it is a broad, interdisciplinary field, and comprises many elements. Sure, on the academic/research side you might do more programming than in the applied/commercial side, but I maintain that you can easily work as a computational linguist without actually doing any programming. For most tasks, readily available software exists by now, so you don't actually need to program anything new.</p>
  
Answers.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Answers.CreationDate: 2020-01-23T21:09:37.757Z
Answers.Text: Thank you for answering (I edited the title of the Q to make it more clear though). Therefore someone who does annotation for ML and all the activities described above is a computational linguist, right?
Answers.UserDisplayName: franz1
Answers.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Answers.CreationDate: 2020-01-24T09:31:26.560Z
Answers.Text: @franz1 Annotation is part of the typical activities of a computational linguist these days, yes.
Answers.UserDisplayName: Oliver Mason
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Answers.CreationDate: 2020-01-23T13:37:34.620Z
Answers.LastActivityDate: 2020-02-04T09:35:00.360Z
Answers.LastEditDate: 2020-02-04T09:35:00.360Z
Answers.UserDisplayName: Oliver Mason
Answers.Body: <p>(Disclosure: I am a researcher and lecturer in Computational Linguistics)</p>
  <p>It is true that annotation and debugging work with existing tools without modification can be considered Computational Linguistics.</p>
  <p>And yet, most Computational Linguists program on a daily basis, since they actively develop tools. Just to give you some context, at major Computational Linguistics conferences such as ACL or EMNLP (the biggest ones), most authors did the coding themselves.</p>
  <p>To say that coding is an unimportant side aspect of being a Computational Linguist, as claimed in another <a href="https://ai.stackexchange.com/a/17637/33073">answer</a>, is a slight misrepresentation.</p>
  
Answers.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Answers.CreationDate: 2020-02-03T21:01:36.083Z
Answers.Text: It depends. I studied Computational Linguistics, and currently work as a computational linguist. My day-to-day work does not involve much coding at all. So I'd say that programming on a daily basis is also a slight misrepresentation :) It also depends if you are more on the Computer Science side, or on the Linguistic side of it. CL is inherently interdisciplinary, so I guess we just have different experiences of it.
Answers.UserDisplayName: Oliver Mason
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Answers.CreationDate: 2020-02-04T08:33:27.877Z
Answers.Text: @OliverMason You are describing your individual experience, while I am trying to describe the research field as a whole. I still maintain that saying that programming is the "least important" aspect of CL is a misrepresentation. If the head of department at your university does not do any coding and never did, he is an outlier among heads of departments of CL.
Answers.UserDisplayName: Mathias Müller
Answers.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Answers.CreationDate: 2020-02-04T09:31:38.680Z
Answers.Text: I'm looking beyond academia; so I guess we just have to agree to disagree on this.
Answers.UserDisplayName: Oliver Mason
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Answers.LastEditDate: 2022-08-11T07:36:41.337Z
Answers.UserDisplayName: Mathias Müller
Body: <p>It's not clear to me whether or not someone whose work aims to <strong>improve an NLP system</strong> may be called a "<em>Computational Linguist</em>" even when she/he <strong>doesn't modify the algorithm directly</strong> by coding.</p>
  
  <p>Let's consider the following activities:</p>
  
  <p>Annotation for Machine Learning: 
  analysis of Morphology, Syntax, POS tagging
  Annotation, analysis, and annotation of entities (NER) and collocations; supporting content categorization; chunking; word sense disambiguation.
  Recording of technical issues of the annotation tool to improve its reliability.
  Recording of linguistic and logical particular rules adopted by the research team who develops the NLP algorithm to improve consistency between annotation and criteria previously adopted to train the NLP.</p>
  
  <p>May be these activities considered "Computational Linguistics"? If not, which is their professional category and how should they be included in the resume in a word which synthesizes them?</p>
  
Tags: <machine-learning><natural-language-processing><terminology>
Title: What is "Computational Linguistics"?
UserDisplayName: franz1
ThreadText: # What is "Computational Linguistics"?
  
  (Asked by: username_0 on 2020-01-23)
  
  It's not clear to me whether or not someone whose work aims to **improve an NLP system** may be called a "*Computational Linguist*" even when she/he **doesn't modify the algorithm directly** by coding.
  
  Let's consider the following activities:
  
  Annotation for Machine Learning:
  analysis of Morphology, Syntax, POS tagging
  Annotation, analysis, and annotation of entities (NER) and collocations; supporting content categorization; chunking; word sense disambiguation.
  Recording of technical issues of the annotation tool to improve its reliability.
  Recording of linguistic and logical particular rules adopted by the research team who develops the NLP algorithm to improve consistency between annotation and criteria previously adopted to train the NLP.
  
  May be these activities considered "Computational Linguistics"? If not, which is their professional category and how should they be included in the resume in a word which synthesizes them?
  
  **Tags:** machine-learning, natural-language-processing, terminology
  
  
  ---
  
  ## 2 answers
  
  ### Answer by username_2 on 2020-01-28. Score: 4 | Accepted answer
  
  (Disclosure: I am a researcher and lecturer in Computational Linguistics)
  
  It is true that annotation and debugging work with existing tools without modification can be considered Computational Linguistics.
  
  And yet, most Computational Linguists program on a daily basis, since they actively develop tools. Just to give you some context, at major Computational Linguistics conferences such as ACL or EMNLP (the biggest ones), most authors did the coding themselves.
  
  To say that coding is an unimportant side aspect of being a Computational Linguist, as claimed in another [answer](https://ai.stackexchange.com/a/17637/33073), is a slight misrepresentation.
  
  > **Comments:**
  > **username_1**: It depends. I studied Computational Linguistics, and currently work as a computational linguist. My day-to-day work does not involve much coding at all. So I'd say that programming on a daily basis is also a slight misrepresentation :) It also depends if you are more on the Computer Science side, or on the Linguistic side of it. CL is inherently interdisciplinary, so I guess we just have different experiences of it.  
  > **username_2**: @username_1 You are describing your individual experience, while I am trying to describe the research field as a whole. I still maintain that saying that programming is the "least important" aspect of CL is a misrepresentation. If the head of department at your university does not do any coding and never did, he is an outlier among heads of departments of CL.  
  > **username_1**: I'm looking beyond academia; so I guess we just have to agree to disagree on this.  
  
  ---
  
  ### Answer by username_1 on 2020-01-23. Score: 5
  
  Yes. A computational linguist is someone who (among other things) uses computers to process/model/analyse/... natural language. Coding might be one aspect of it, but is about the least important: you can always get a non-linguist programmer to do coding for you.
  
  I studied "Computational Linguistics" at university, and while programming was taught as part of the course, coding was only a minor aspect in the actual subject matter. The senior professor (and head of the department) wasn't able to do any coding himself; he came from the linguistics side of it.
  
  Being able to program is useful, as it speeds things up and makes you more independent, but it is by no means an important part of being a computational linguist.
  
  UPDATE: I have been accused of misrepresenting the field of CL. However, it is a broad, interdisciplinary field, and comprises many elements. Sure, on the academic/research side you might do more programming than in the applied/commercial side, but I maintain that you can easily work as a computational linguist without actually doing any programming. For most tasks, readily available software exists by now, so you don't actually need to program anything new.
  
  > **Comments:**
  > **username_0**: Thank you for answering (I edited the title of the Q to make it more clear though). Therefore someone who does annotation for ML and all the activities described above is a computational linguist, right?  
  > **username_1**: @username_0 Annotation is part of the typical activities of a computational linguist these days, yes.  
  
  ---
  
  