Scope, Methodology and Relevance of Computational Linguistic Research

Abstract: The paper identifies various trends in cognitive linguistics comprising corpus linguistics, tagging and formalisation of linguistic regularities. The paper suggests that language be seen as interaction between text and grammar: language is not seen either as text or as grammar but as interaction between the two. A computational model for processing Danish language within the framework of cognitive grammar is presented. The model comprises lexicon and morphology, tagging and parsing procedures and a spelling checker. It is shown that methodology plays a major role in relation to computer modelling of text comprehension. Besides being influenced by cognitive grammar, the software has also been influenced by empirical facts about the Danish language together with evaluation through prototyping. Consequently it is suggested that language technology be developed on experimental grounds rather than formal specification only. 1