Morphology meets computational linguistics - Special issue of 'Lingue e linguaggio'

The studies collected in this special issue of Lingue e linguaggio aim to sketch a picture of the interfaces between morphology, computational linguistics, and corpus linguistics. Some of these studies are the outcome of the Galileo project “Lessico e regole di formazione di parola: un approccio tipologico e computazionale”, supported by the Università Italo-Francese and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and were presented at the workshop “Morphology Meets Computational Linguistics”, held at the University of Bologna on October 7-8, 2010. The papers published in this issue have been selected through a blind peer review process. Each paper has been reviewed by two anonymous referees. A general trend of present-day linguistic research is the emergence of interfaces between different domains and approaches. In particular, morphology has proven to have much to gain from the interaction with Natural Language Processing in terms of tools for the automatic extraction of data and the implementation of theoretical hypotheses. Conversely, NLP can benefit from an observation of data that is less impressionistic and based on a solid theoretical background. Since it is primarily linked with the lexicon, morphology is one of the domains of linguistic analysis that has benefited the most from technological innovation in the last decades. Automatized lexicographic resources first, and, more recently, the huge amount of data to which the Net has given researchers access to has had a strong influence on research both on inflectional and derivational morphology. In some cases, this has not only led to more accurate analyses of data, but to real changes in theoretical perspectives. In this respect, morphologists cannot avoid having systematic interaction with specialists of NLP in order to develop tools for the construction, the annotation, and the analysis of large-scale corpora. All the contributions contained in this issue exemplify at least one of these interfaces, and each of the papers presents an original look on the interplay of morphological issues and computational techniques.