Revolution in Computational Linguistics Towards a Genuinely Applied Science

Among people working in Computational Linguistics (CL) around 1990 and still active in the field now, there is a widely shared feeling that they have witnessed a revolution. This paper shows which developments are responsible for this perception and which elements are central in the actual revolution. In order to avoid terminological confusion, the concept of revolution as it is used here is clarified first. Then the development in the subfield of Machine Translation is studied in some detail. It is argued that the actual revolution consists in a shift of attention from the application of theoretical knowledge to the solution of practical problems. To the extent that this shift is representative of more general developments in the field, the conclusions can be generalized to CL as a whole.