Each year, the ACL Test-of-Time awards recognize up to four papers for their lasting impact on the Computational Linguistics field: two papers from 25 years earlier, and two papers from 10 years earlier.
The 2020 winners of the 1995 Test-of-Time Award are:
Barbara J. Grosz, Aravind K. Joshi, Scott Weinstein. Centering: A Framework for Modeling the Local Coherence of Discourse. Computational Linguistics, 21(2), June
Computational linguistics is the scientific study of language from a computational perspective. Computational linguists are interested in providing computational models of various kinds of linguistic phenomena. These models may be "knowledge-based" ("hand-crafted") or "data-driven" ("statistical" or "empirical"). Work in computational linguistics is in some cases motivated from a scientific perspective in that one is trying to provide a computational explanation for a particular linguistic or psycholinguistic phenomenon; and in other cases the motivation may be more purely technological in that one wants to provide a working component of a speech or natural language system. Indeed, the work of computational linguists is incorporated into many working systems today, including speech recognition systems, text-to-speech synthesizers, automated voice response systems, web search engines, text editors, language instruction materials, to name just a few.
Popular computational linguistics textbooks include: