The Workshop on Bridges and Gaps between Formal and Computational Linguistics
Workshop website: https://brigap-workshop.github.io/
BriGap is a venue for linguists and NLP scientists to meet: what fruitful interactions can we have? How do we build upon each other’s work?
In recent years, the natural language processing (NLP) community has shifted its focus towards engineering questions. This state of affairs is in no small part due to the recent technical advances that have transformed NLP as a field. In the current large language model (LLM) era, much of what was deemed near impossible to achieve a few years prior is now taken for granted and it stands to reason that mapping how far ahead new computational models have advanced the field has become a central topic for the NLP community. Hence, the current ongoing discourse in NLP focuses more on what can be achieved through language rather than studying language for its own sake. It seems thus that computational and formal linguistics are now separate domains, and that the former is no longer rooted in the latter.
The BriGap series of workshop aims to provide a space to develop and foster these interactions. After a successful first edition at ESSLI in 2022 and a second installment at IWCS in 2025, we are now looking forward to the holding third iteration in the near future.
BriGap branches out of the monthly online seminar on the interactions between formal linguistic and computational linguistics (ILFC) organized since 2021.