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?
Due to the recent technical advances that have transformed natural language processing (NLP) as a field, the NLP community has gradually shifted its focus towards engineering questions and the current ongoing discourse in NLP focuses more on what can be achieved through language rather studying language for its own sake.
At a glance, it would appear that computational and formal linguistics are now separate domains and that the former is no longer rooted in the latter. Yet, there is sustained interest within formal linguistics in both explaining the successes of neural-based NLP models and uncovering their limitations. Conversely, neural methods have proven their usefulness for linguistics time and again. Furthermore, one should not forget the contribution to theoretical linguistics provided, for example, by the computational implementation of grammatical formalisms.
To what extent are these traditions truly divorced, and what fruitful bridges can be (re)built? To answer these questions, the BriGap series of workshops on Bridges and Gaps between Formal and Computational Linguistics intends to provide a space for formal linguists, computational linguists, and NLP scientists to exchange their perspectives on how their different domains of research can build upon one another.
After a successful first edition at ESSLI in 2022, a second installment at IWCS in 2025, and a third iteration as a standalone event in Paris in 2026, we are now organising a fourth edition.
BriGap branches out of the monthly online seminar on the interactions between formal linguistic and computational linguistics (ILFC) organized since 2021.