Functional programming and NLP

Most of today’s NLP software is developed using either a logic pro-gramming language such as Prolog, or a low-level imperative language such as C or C++. In this paper I will try to argue why the paradigm of functional programming (as opposed to logic and imperative program-ming) matters for natural language processing. One reason for why functional programming hasn’t caught on among com-putational linguists could be that the functions are often explained from a math-ematical perspective, and that can scare away non-mathematicians such as lin-guists. Another reason could be that linguists often learn predicate logic as the basis for NL semantics, and logic programming is closer to predicate logic than other programming paradigms. In this paper I will try to argue that functional programming is a good paradigm for many natural lanugage tasks. In a way it is a version of Joh