Introduction to the special section on the interaction between formal and computational linguistics

While computational linguistics is historically rooted in formal linguistics, it might seem that the distance between these two fields has only grown larger as each field evolved. Still, whether this impression is correct or not, not all links have been cut, and new ones have appeared. Indeed, while we are currently witnessing a growing interest within formal linguistics in both explaining the remarkable successes of neural-based language models and uncovering their limitations, one should not forget the contribution to theoretical linguistics provided, for example, by the computational implementation of grammatical formalisms. And while neural-based methods have recently received the lion’s share of the public attention, interpretable models based on symbolic methods are still relevant and widely used in the natural language processing industry. The links that exist between formal and computational linguistics have been the subject of discussion for a long time. At the 2009 European Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, a workshop entitled “Interaction between Linguistics and Computational Linguistics: Virtuous, Vicious or Vacuous?” was organised. This workshop led to the publication a couple of years later of the sixth volume of Linguistic Issues in Language Technology (Baldwin and Kordoni 2011). At the centre of this publication were discussions about