Last Words - published articles

Last Words

This page provides links to all the Last Words pieces that have appeared in CL. Last Words pieces offer a personal opinion or provocative perspective on some aspect of the field of computational linguistics. Contact the Editor directly if you are interested in submitting such a piece.

• Diyi Yang, Dirk Hovy, David Jurgens, Barbara Plank [2025] Socially Aware Language Technologies: Perspectives and Practices, Computational Linguistics (2025) 51(2):689-703.
• Kees van Deemter [2024] The Pitfalls of Defining Hallucination, Computational Linguistics (2024) 50(2): 807–8.
• Richard Sproat [2022] Boring Problems are Sometimes the Most Interesting Computational Linguistics (2022) 48(2) 483-490.
• Manaal Faruqui, Dilek Hakkani-Tur [2022] Revisiting the Boundary between ASR and NLU in the Age of Conversational Dialog Systems Computational Linguistics (2022) 48(1):221-232.
• Ralph Weischedel, Elizabeth Boschee [2018] What Can Be Accomplished with the State of the Art in Information Extraction? A Personal View Computational Linguistics (2018) 44(4):651-658.
• Paola Merlo [2018] Festina Lente: A Farewell from the Editor Computational Linguistics (2018) 44(2):379--385.
• Malvina Nissim, Lasha Abzianidze, Kilian Evang, Rob van der Goot, Hessel Haagsma, Barbara Plank, Martijn Wieling [2017] Sharing Is Caring: The Future of Shared Tasks Computational Linguistics (2017) 43(4): 897-904.
• Christopher D. Manning [2015] Computational Linguistics and Deep Learning Computational Linguistics (2015) 41(4): 701-707.
• Stefan Riezler [2014] On the Problem of Theoretical Terms in Empirical Computational Linguistics Computational Linguistics (2014) 40(1): 235-245.
• Karën Fort, Gilles Adda, K. Bretonnel Cohen [2011] Amazon Mechanical Turk: Gold Mine or Coal Mine? Computational Linguistics (2011) 37(2): 413-420.
• Inderjeet Mani [2011] Improving Our Reviewing Processes Computational Linguistics (2011) 37(1):261-265.
• Nat Lang [2010] Are We Near the End of the Journal? Computational Linguistics (2010) 36(4): 817--821.
• Richard Sproat [2010] Ancient Symbols, Computational Linguistics, and the Reviewing Practices of the General Science Journals Computational Linguistics (2010) 36(3): 586--594.
• Emiel Krahmer [2010] What Computational Linguists Can Learn from Psychologists (and Vice Versa) Computational Linguistics (2010) 36(2): 285-294.
• Stan Szpakowicz [2010] Failure is an Orphan (Let's Adopt) Computational Linguistics (2010) 36(1): 157-158.
• Shuly Wintner [2009] What Science Underlies Natural Language Engineering? Computational Linguistics (2009) 35(4): 641-644.
• Steven Bird [2009] Natural Language Processing and Linguistic Fieldwork Computational Linguistics (2009) 35(3): 469-474.
• Anja Belz [2009] That's Nice ... What Can You Do With It? Computational Linguistics (2009) 35(1): 111-118.
• Robert Dale [2008] What's the Future for Computational Linguistics? Computational Linguistics (2008) 34(4)621-624..
• Ted Pedersen [2008] Empiricism Is Not a Matter of Faith. Computational Linguistics (2008) 34(3): 465-470.
• Mark Steedman [2008] On Becoming a Discipline. Computational Linguistics (2008) (34(1): 137-144.
• Bonnie Webber [2007] Breaking News: Changing Attitudes and Practices. Computational Linguistics (2007) 33(4): 607--611.
• Karen Sparck Jones [2007] Computational Linguistics: What About the Linguistics? Computational Linguistics (2007) 33(3): 437--441.
• Ehud Reiter [2007] The Shrinking Horizons of Computational Linguistics. Computational Linguistics (2007) 33(2): 283-287.
• Adam Kilgarriff [2007] Googleology is Bad Science. Computational Linguistics (2007) 33(1): 147-151.
• Annie Zaenen [2006] Mark-up Barking Up the Wrong Tree. Computational Linguistics (2006) 32(4): 577-580.
• Kenneth Church [2005] Reviewing the Reviewers. Computational Linguistics (2005) 31(4): 575-578.