RGCL Anniversary Highlights, Day 21

Published on Sep, 5 2022 by RGCL.

The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics (Second Edition)

The field of Computational Linguistics moves rapidly, perhaps too rapidly for traditional publishing methods. Nonetheless, after the huge success of the first edition of the Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics in 2003, it went without saying that a second edition should follow. Fast forward 19 years, and this year, in 2022, the significantly updated and revised second edition was finally published in hardback by OUP.

The cover of the second edition of the Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics

Now expanded to have four parts, and with contributions from 71 leading names at institutions ranging from Harvard, Cornell, and – of course – the University of Wolverhampton, this second edition is a modernised study companion for scholars and students of all levels in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing.

The volume has a total of 50 chapters, 17 of them brand new and all 50 significantly revised, and covers a range of cutting-edge methods and applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP), including Deep Learning, Machine Translation, Sentiment Analysis, Text Simplification, and Biomedical Computational Linguistics. The final chapter, Recent Developments in Natural Language Processing, shines a light of some of the most recent and pressing uses of NLP, including chatbots, computer vision, crowdsourced data, and NLP for the benefit of society.

This new edition of the Handbook also features a comprehensive and much-extended reference glossary of almost 900 Computational Linguistics terms, carefully compiled by RGCL’s Professor Patrick Hanks (former Editor-in-Chief of Oxford English Dictionaries) and Dr Emma Franklin.

RGCL’s Dr Emma Franklin and Prof Ruslan Mitkov celebrating the physical publication of the second edition of the Handbook

Professor Mitkov, Director of the Research Institute of Information and Language Processing, and Head of RGCL, said:

“I am very proud to share the news of the publication of the second and substantially revised edition of the Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics. As Prof Dan Jurafsky from Stanford University (one of the leading lights of the field) said, ‘This volume will define the field for another decade’. When I was designing the Handbook and its contents, I made sure through a tightly controlled editing process that not only the most important and latest topics are covered but that the volume is a coherent whole by ensuring cross-references across all chapters. I am delighted that colleagues and students will have access to this new valuable resource; I am particularly happy for the students. I would very much like to acknowledge the role my colleague Dr Emma Franklin who assisted me in the production at every stage: without her expert help, this challenging project would have been significantly delayed.”

RGCL members celebrating the publication at this year’s OHCL book launch