Re: Perl and Linguistics

[mattr]

Sounds like a great idea as I mentioned in some other threads. There are some morphological softwares in Perl like EMERGE and FLEMM at the Natural Language Software Registry in Germany, search for "perl". That db is heavier on Java however there are initiatives for linguistics in both perl and java. Some systems have apis for both languages, like WordNet which has lots of other interfaces too.

I have used C++ based tools on linux for Japanese morphological analysis, such as chasen. Such tools are critical in Japanese and are used in indexing for a search engine (link), basically C++ is needed for speed in that case. Perl will let you develop more quickly and you can later roll time-sensitive functions in C/C++, or make a Perl API to some C++ tool if you need it.

Actually why not just search google.com with terms "perl" and "linguistics", or "computational linguistics". You will see that you are not alone, and may find some work. Computational linguistics courses seem to use Perl often. This page at Ohio State, Languages for computational linguistics, notes that Perl is phenomenally popular in the field and Java plays catch-up to Perl's feature set. It says, "Most work in industry is done in Perl and C++; Java can be expected to have a growing role as time goes on."

There is also a page about how Perl was designed based on linguistics principles, and the document has the same title as this thread.. Perl & Linguistics.

To be fair, Perl is not the only one on the block and it may even be that more java things are being created than perl things. But from what I can see Perl is the natural match to linguistics and the CPAN is a great way to share that work and see it used by many people. Otherwise you may like to check out Prolog, Haskell, and tools/languages used in knowledge engineering.