Last Words - published articles

Last Words pieces offer a personal opinion or provocative perspective on some aspect of computational linguistics. This page lists all Last Words pieces published in Computational Linguistics.

Interested in writing a Last Words piece (up to 10 pages)? Please contact the Editor-in-Chief at editor@cljournal.org.
Year Article
2025 We Should Evaluate Real-World Impact
Ehud Reiter · CL 51(4):1419–1431
2025 Natural Language Processing RELIES on Linguistics
Juri Opitz, Shira Wein, Nathan Schneider · CL 51(3):1009–1032
2025 Socially Aware Language Technologies: Perspectives and Practices
Diyi Yang, Dirk Hovy, David Jurgens, Barbara Plank · CL 51(2):689–703
2024 The Pitfalls of Defining Hallucination
Kees van Deemter · CL 50(2):807–816
2022 Boring Problems Are Sometimes the Most Interesting
Richard Sproat · CL 48(2):483–490
2022 Revisiting the Boundary between ASR and NLU in the Age of Conversational Dialog Systems
Manaal Faruqui, Dilek Hakkani-Tür · CL 48(1):221–232
2018 What Can Be Accomplished with the State of the Art in Information Extraction? A Personal View
Ralph Weischedel, Elizabeth Boschee · CL 44(4):651–658
2018 Festina Lente: A Farewell from the Editor
Paola Merlo · CL 44(2):379–385
2017 Sharing Is Caring: The Future of Shared Tasks
Malvina Nissim, Lasha Abzianidze, Kilian Evang, Rob van der Goot, Hessel Haagsma, Barbara Plank, Martijn Wieling · CL 43(4):897–904
2015 Computational Linguistics and Deep Learning
Christopher D. Manning · CL 41(4):701–707
2014 On the Problem of Theoretical Terms in Empirical Computational Linguistics
Stefan Riezler · CL 40(1):235–245
2011 Amazon Mechanical Turk: Gold Mine or Coal Mine?
Karën Fort, Gilles Adda, K. Bretonnel Cohen · CL 37(2):413–420
2011 Improving Our Reviewing Processes
Inderjeet Mani · CL 37(1):261–265
2010 Are We Near the End of the Journal?
Nat Lang · CL 36(4):817–821
2010 Ancient Symbols, Computational Linguistics, and the Reviewing Practices of the General Science Journals
Richard Sproat · CL 36(3):586–594
2010 What Computational Linguists Can Learn from Psychologists (and Vice Versa)
Emiel Krahmer · CL 36(2):285–294
2010 Failure is an Orphan (Let's Adopt)
Stan Szpakowicz · CL 36(1):157–158
2009 What Science Underlies Natural Language Engineering?
Shuly Wintner · CL 35(4):641–644
2009 Natural Language Processing and Linguistic Fieldwork
Steven Bird · CL 35(3):469–474
2009 That's Nice ... What Can You Do With It?
Anja Belz · CL 35(1):111–118
2008 What's the Future for Computational Linguistics?
Robert Dale · CL 34(4):621–624
2008 Empiricism Is Not a Matter of Faith
Ted Pedersen · CL 34(3):465–470
2008 On Becoming a Discipline
Mark Steedman · CL 34(1):137–144
2007 Breaking News: Changing Attitudes and Practices
Bonnie Webber · CL 33(4):607–611
2007 Computational Linguistics: What About the Linguistics?
Karen Spärck Jones · CL 33(3):437–441
2007 The Shrinking Horizons of Computational Linguistics
Ehud Reiter · CL 33(2):283–287
2007 Googleology is Bad Science
Adam Kilgarriff · CL 33(1):147–151
2006 Mark-up Barking Up the Wrong Tree
Annie Zaenen · CL 32(4):577–580
2005 Reviewing the Reviewers
Kenneth Church · CL 31(4):575–578