Distortion or improvement
Hans Karlgren · 1996
Effects of information technology on the development of natural languagesOn some occasions during Coling conferences we should raise our gaze from the hows of our trade to regard the whys and whynots.Ever since the first Coling was arranged and the term computational linguistics was coined, our undertaking has had two faces: research, where computation is used for better understanding of language, and application, where understanding of language is used for better computation.It has been taken for granted that practical effects, if any, are positive.In particular, it has been tacitly assumed, the languages in use between humans, what engineers see as some unique next to metaphysical entity which they call "natural language" -in singular!-would be unaffected.Is that really so?