Introduction to computational phonology

Despite being the oldest discipline in linguistics, phonology remains largely unexplored from a computational standpoint. While phonology gave us such innovations as the ‘distinctive feature’, now heavily used in computational linguistics, phonology itself is yet to reap the benefits of the formal and technological developments it gave rise to. Recently however, computational phonology has been rapidly gaining recognition as an independent area of inquiry within computational linguistics. The ACL Special Interest Group inComputational Phonology (SIGPHON)was formed in 1991and has served as a focus for ongoing work in the area. In June of that year I proposed that there be a special issue of Computational Linguistics dedicated to computational phonology, since there were many good-quality papers in circulation which had no obvious venue for publication. The resulting collection which you have before you is a representative sample of this work; some submissions not ready in time for this volume will appear in subsequent regular issues. Other work in this area is to be found in the Proceedings of the First Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Phonology, published by the ACL in 1994, and two edited collections (Bird 1991, Ellison & Scobbie 1993). The purposeof this short piece is to introduce computationalphonology and the special issue. I shall begin by presenting some background to the field, followed by a survey of the research themes currently under investigation. Next, an overview of the papers in this collection is given, concluding with an explanation of the one-page commentaries which follow each paper. So, what is phonology, and why should computational linguists care about it?